Her subjects exist in a temporal continuum–one that calls forth the purposeful workings and reworkings at the heart of a studio practice and the more mysterious machinations of visual and emotional memory.
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Craven’s mind is at once wholly engaged in the moment of making and keenly aware of the way the past always pierces the present. Yet, when viewed together, her works also reveal a deliberate, iterative thinker. She combines ostensibly lighthearted subject matter and a captivating handling of paint with a rule-bound, systematic approach to features like the size and titles of her compositions.Ĭraven’s effervescent palette and expert paint handling are evidence of her ability to get lost in the visual and textural pleasures of painting. Her signature subjects birds, other animals, flowers, the moon – draw on direct observation as well as an expansive, personally curated archive of preexisting images.įor more than three decades, Craven has worked to dismantle the distinction between subjectively expressive art making and the ordered, cerebral practices often grouped under the heading of conceptual practice. “I’ve always struggled with the idea that I just want to paint what I’m looking at and abandon all these sort of smart-ass things I try to do with birds and stuff ….”* Forthright, witty, and self-aware, Craven’s comments hint at the heady mix of contradictions at the heart of her work.
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“I learned how to paint by looking, by looking at something in the round and painting it,” Craven insisted last year in a conversation with her friend, the painter Lois Dodd.
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Hannah Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present Flowers (Watercolors), a solo exhibition of new works by Ann Craven, who lives and works in New York City and summers in Cushing, Maine.