Ann Craven

b. 1967

Ann Craven makes moody paintings of birds, flowers, animals, and the moon. Craven considers the waxing and waning of the moon to be “a perfect subject.”  While she sometimes paints her moonscapes during the day, most of the time she paints them outside at night. She has worked with the sky and the moon since her parents died because she finds solace in remembering that they saw the same sky as she sees now. She painted her first “Moon” in 1995. This experience “Gave me my subject matter. I was literally chasing the moon.”

Born in Boston, Craven mostly lives and works in New York City. In 1986, she received her B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and in 1993 her M.F.A. from New York’s Columbia University. While a graduate student at Columbia she became a studio assistant to Alex Katz and learned more from being his assistant than from any course in graduate school. 

Craven visits Maine every summer and has been painting there since the early 1990s. In 2017, she bought St. James Catholic Church in Thomason, Maine that serves as her studio and a seasonal exhibition space. As a gallery, it opened in the summer of 2021 with a two-person show “Moons and Angels,” presented by Karma Gallery of New York and Los Angeles. 

Since she lives in the city, it is not possible for Craven to have close views of birds or wild-life animals. So unlike her moon scapes, painted directly en-plein air, she uses postcards, sketches, and photographs found on the Internet, appropriated from artists Gustave Courbet, Francis Picabia, Georgia O’Keefe and others, for her bird and animal paintings. 

In one exhibit she made paintings of bouquets of white roses which were inspired by funeral arrangements. Each painting consisted of a bouquet of flowers in a glass vase perched on top of a stool. The flowers were painted in shades of back and white and were set off against a shadowy background. The effect was one of melancholy.

She paints several versions or multiple reiterations of the same subject matter, or she will make the  same painting in different sizes and in different mediums as if in a continuum. She often repaints and enlarges her small en-plein air paintings in her studio. In smaller versions we can look ‘at’ a nature scene, but in her oversize versions we are looking ‘into’ a scene as in her 2023 seven-foot-tall “Fawn in Night Field.”

She has exhibited n the United States and Europe. Her work is in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum, and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland Museum of Art, Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and others. 

More here.