Ann Craven

This catalog, accompanying Karma’s three-part exhibition of new paintings by Ann Craven (born 1967), surveys major motifs of the artist’s nearly 30-year-long practice. For the first time, she has set all of her scenes in the darkness of evening, creating a consistent chromatic background that intensifies her always-vibrant colors. These oils of moons, trees, birds, flowers and deer constitute the latest chapter in her systematic catalog of what she terms “revisitations,” each of which is also a reinvention of her subject matter. In this body of work, and across her practice, figuration morphs into kaleidoscopic abstraction and back again, each canvas resisting easy categorization in favor of pure feeling. In addition to a lush plate section, this volume features an intimate conversation between the artist and curator Jay Sanders, an expansive art-historical essay by Richard Kalina and poems written and collected in dedication to Craven by Susan Howe.

Organized by the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Twelve Moons presents the visionary works of American painter Ann Craven (born 1967), known for her vibrant depictions of the moon and the night sky. Through her practice of painting en plein air, Craven captures the conditions she observes over the course of the lunar cycle, which then become the inspiration for her larger monumental compositions. In an extensive series, Craven creates a captivating panorama that encompasses the cycles of the moon throughout the 2022 lunar year. Often painting from the same viewpoint, Craven’s nocturnal yet tranquil compositions sometimes only differ in the light that the moon casts on her surroundings. Twelve Moons forms a distinct chapter in Craven’s oeuvre, showcasing her ongoing fascination with the wonders of the natural phenomena that surround us.

Ann Craven (born 1972) superimposes source photographs, historical works and her own paintings, creating mediated images that feature layer upon layer of referentiality—a collage of her most treasured curios. Peacocks showcase their plumage; birds perch on a branch; a trio of horses pose “just so.” Through these acts of creation and recreation, Craven becomes both master and copyist, citing herself in her own art historical lineage.
Animals, birds, flowers, moons: Craven’s motifs are in themselves an incantation—a wish to repeat, reencounter, relive. In keeping with this process of revisitation, Craven’s paintings are repeated in threes throughout this fully illustrated catalog, mimicking the tripartite structure of her Animals Birds Flowers Moons exhibition. The book is divided into three parts, each paired with one of three texts: two newly commissioned essays by Durga Chew-Bose and Keith Mayerson, and a 2021 interview between Craven and Lois Dodd.

Birds We Know is the catalog for an exhibition of paintings by New York–based artist Ann Craven (born 1967). This large survey at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art is the artist's first exhibition in Maine, where she has been living part-time and painting since the early 1990s. It was at her farm house in Lincolnville, Maine, inspired by the colors of the natural environment, that Craven completed her very first moon painting in 1995; she says her time in Lincolnville "gave me my subject matter." The new exhibition and catalog include the imagery that Craven is renowned for including her lushly colored, mesmerizing moon and stripe paintings, but here the birds dominate as the primary subject, including work made between 1997 and 2019. The book includes an essay by Christopher B. Crosman, formerly of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Farnsworth Art Museum.

The latest in Karma's series of comprehensive overviews of artist practices, this substantial, 560-page volume collects 20 years of work by New York painter Ann Craven (born 1967), covering her series of moons, birds, palettes, animals and flowers. Craven is well known for these mesmerizing portraits, whose serial character affirms the prayer-like sense of attention informing their dailiness, as well as for her "stripe" or "band" paintings, of which she says: "my paintings are a result of mere observation, experiment and chance and contain a variable that’s constant and ever-changing—the moment just past. The stripes are so I can see what I just mixed … it is a memory and a documentation of the work at the same time." The most substantial overview yet published on this virtuoso painter, the book includes essays by David Salle, Sarah French and Dana Miller.