Search results for ""Author Ann Craven""

A epic painterly panorama of an alternate American 21st century New York–based painter Keith Mayerson (born 1966) is inspired by symbols of American history and pop culture. He depicts familiar figures who have affected the country’s consciousness—in addition to personal scenes and his abstract “iconscapes”—through microscopic brushstrokes and coloring. While his formal qualities hint at a French Impressionist influence, his images also evoke the spiritual and cultural commentary of the Symbolists as well as the more visionary aspects of American modernists and the Old Masters. In this survey, Mayerson constructs what he calls a “wordless novel” for the 21st century: an alternate history in which the cultural landscape of American politics is reconstructed to emphasize belonging and understanding. Since the George W. Bush era, his long-running nonlinear narrative My American Dream has been presented in separate catalogs as “chapters,” and the ongoing series continues through today. This latest chapter features hundreds of works ranging in date from 1997 to 2021, replete with a foreword by cartoonist Gary Panter, an essay by painter Ann Craven and a conversation between Keith Mayerson and painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer.

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Luminous painterly interpretations of two abiding motifs in art history A two-person exhibition featuring angel paintings by Reggie Burrows Hodges (born 1965) and moon paintings by Ann Craven (born 1967), Moons and Angels was staged in the former St James Catholic church at 70 Main Street in Thomaston, Maine. Appearing throughout the canon of art history, these enduring celestial subjects have served as protectors and messengers. Craven and Hodges create warm and inviting interpretations of these guiding lights that allow the viewer to, in Hodges’s words, “offer up and be offered back.” This comprehensive, fully illustrated exhibition catalog features a collection of poems by Susan Howe.

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Permutation and portraiture: serial paintings of moons, stripes and the birds of Maine by Ann Craven 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.

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A panorama of painterly motifs, combined and reprised 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.

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