NEW YORK, NY.- The eight nocturnal paintings in Night survey major motifs of Ann Craven’s nearly thirty-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. Craven primarily approaches her subjects in one of two ways: painting from observation or from appropriated sources, both her own former compositions and images from books, postcards, movies, posters, and other painters, notably Georgia O’Keeffe. The methods are intimately connected, as she often scales up and repaints her small en plein air paintings in the studio. 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.
Craven’s methodical revisitations emerge from material and psychic loss. In 1999, a fire decimated her studio, existing work, and personal belongings. Her efforts to recover from the catastrophe led to her first copies, canvases painted from memories of her prior works, and initiated a lifelong project of duplication and reiteration. Lacking a single fixed referent, her paintings multiply serially from the realms of emotion and memory. Each of the artist’s works contains within it the entire history of her practice, forming a link in an index of representations of representations. Marking the mysterious hours between sunset and sunrise, Night acknowledges the centrality of time’s passage in the artist’s oeuvre—the lag between perceiving an object and painting it, the movement from one canvas to the next, the continuous rotation of our earth.
In Night, Craven’s brushstrokes describe her revisited subjects as feathery, lush, and brimming with vital energy and tender feelings. Fawn in Night Field, 2023 (all works 2023 and seven-by-six feet) depicts a sad-eyed doe against a sea of brushy grass shrouded in darkness, and yet elemental daisies in white and girlish pink emit an otherworldly illumination as they leave the ground and float hazily through the night sky. This deer has been a friend of Craven’s since she first painted it in 1998, when she appropriated the original image from the 1973 dystopian science fiction film Soylent Green. Behind a warbling, chesty Northern bluebird resting atop a blooming branch in Bold as Love, 2023 is a swirling vortex of pastels. This tempest of abstract color evokes the minimalist-yet-riotous Stripe canvases that Craven makes from the mixed oil paint that remains once she finishes a work from her oeuvre. The rarely-exhibited Stripes comprise an indexical archive that the artist, in her words, “naughtily” hides away from the world, preserving them for her own future reference. Bold as Love, 2023 reprises a painting she first exhibited in 2007, ten years after she began rendering specimens from an ornithology book discovered in the basement of her deceased grandmother’s Boston home.
The bouquet is one of the artist’s newest motifs in Night, originating only thirteen years ago. Craven’s marks in Dahlia’s (For the Pink Moon), 2023 and Brown Eyed Susan’s (For the Orange Moon), 2023 feel immediate, as if unmediated transmissions from the artist’s eye to the canvas. Her wet-on-wet technique allows the petals of one flower to flow seamlessly into the next. Here, and across her practice, figuration morphs into kaleidoscopic abstraction and back again, each canvas resisting easy categorization in favor of pure feeling. Craven “is painting,” in the words of poet Ariana Reines, “desire itself.”
In Purple Beech (Night Sky), 2023, a glowing moon peeks through the dense foliage of the titular deciduous shade tree, while in Moon (Green Haze Full, Cushing), 2023, the earth’s satellite simultaneously casts a salmon-pink reflection on Maine’s Saint George River and radiates green rings of light. Craven’s moons have been central to her cosmology since they formed the sole subject matter of her one-person debut exhibition in 1995. These lunar paintings originate in nights spent outdoors, closely observing the celestial body and capturing it on canvas in near-darkness, with only the memory of her palette guiding her brush.
Ann Craven (b. 1967, Boston) makes self-reflexive paintings that comment on devotion, loss, and the immortalizing nature of her medium. Primarily using unabashedly high-key colors, she paints and repaints her key subjects—winsome animals and flowers modeled after those found in vintage books and postcards, among other iconic twentieth-century sources, and the moon as observed by the artist herself. Craven’s emotional conceptualism inheres in these affectively charged repetitions, each of which is accompanied by an indexical canvas Palette used for the respective work’s color mixing and archived by the artist, like her Stripes, for her future reference. Like On Kawara, her oeuvre is a catalog of time passed; like Agnes Martin, evidence of her hand is the true content of her work. With each rearticulation, Craven reasserts her brushstroke as a bulwark against the degradation of memory.
Recent solo exhibitions include the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2023); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland (2019); and Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France (2014). Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Karma
Ann Craven: Night
November 2nd, 2023 – December 20th, 2023
