ROCKLAND, Maine — For Ann Craven, to color blooms, branches, animals, and night time skies, with their cycles of life, loss of life, and renewal, is a approach to mark the passage of time. About three many years in the past, the artist began to file moonrises from a seashore in Maine for a solo present comprised of 101 en plein air moon work. Ever since, this theme has develop into a mainstay in her oeuvre — and moon works kind the luminous by line of her mid-career survey, Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024), on the Farnsworth Artwork Museum.
The exhibition opened in Might as a part of a trio of concurrent Maine museum exhibits that commemorate Craven because the recipient of the 2025 Maine in America Award. This slate of solo exhibits included three rotations of moon work at Bowdoin School Museum of Artwork and a mini highlight at Portland Museum of Artwork. Painted Time options 30 gestural, wet-on-wet oil work that the artist made inside the previous 4 turbulent years, beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic. The present is organized into sections centered on moons, timber, flowers, and birds — motifs that Craven returns to steadily, usually meticulously reproducing her earlier work by hand. She began this replication observe after shedding almost all of her art work and photographic documentation in a studio fireplace in 1999. Within the aftermath, she recreated a few of her destroyed items from reminiscence. Now, this spirit of remaking buttresses her inventive observe.
Ann Craven, (left to proper) “Portrait of a Robin I (Looking, After Picabia), 2022” and “Portrait of a Robin II (Looking, After Picabia), 2022” (each 2022)
For every “revisitation,” as Craven calls her re-paintings, she channels her previous actions to make the identical marks, thus producing the identical compositions many times, like a dancer following the footsteps of acquainted choreography. Bearing these repeated gestures, her canvases double as vessels for reminiscence. She provides one other archival layer by retaining the canvases that she makes use of as palettes, smeared with globs of paint, sketches, and scrawled notations, and embedding diaristic dates and particulars within the titles, as seen in “Untitled (Trees, Portraits, 11-24-24 to 12-24-24)” (2024). By means of this idiosyncratic creative-archival observe, Craven develops muscle reminiscence and builds a bulwark towards loss and forgetting.
Trying intently at a grouping of Craven’s duplicate artworks is like enjoying a recreation of “spot the difference.” Displayed collectively, her larger-than-life robin work, for instance, share an an identical shade palette and composition: Every portrays a fowl perched upon a department, set towards a dreamy swirl of lush leaves and pastel blossoms. However minute mutations within the brushstrokes reveal refined variations. One thing shifts with each chorus. Right here, as in nature, change is a continuing, generative cycle.
Ann Craven, “Moon (Quiet, Eternally August), 2023” (2023)
Moons, nevertheless, dominate the exhibition. Greater than half of the work are dedicated to the topic: yellow moons streaked with clouds, pink areola moons framed by tree branches, vases of dahlias flanked by lemon moons, peach moons with glowing concentric rings that soften into ocean waves. In a movie screened in an adjoining room, the artist is proven engaged on a New York Metropolis rooftop at night time, her three side-by-side easels romantically lit by white candles. Because the moon rises, the clouds drift and the nocturnal colours shift. With every flick of her brush, Craven makes an attempt to protect these fleeting moments with all of the ritual and reverence of a poet murmuring a prayer into the ether.
In Painted Time, Craven faucets into the moon’s timeless present of collective expertise, framing its celestial gentle and everlasting return as a gradual supply of solace, in addition to a template for transformation: The moon slims to a sliver and leaves vanish from tree branches, however all the time they emerge anew, signaling hope for a brand new starting.
Ann Craven, “Untitled (Trees, Portraits, 11-24-24 to 12-24-24), 2024” (2024), oil on canvas (picture by Dough Clough, courtesy Farnsworth Artwork Museum)
Ann Craven, “Red Singing Finch (Night Song), 2023” (2023), oil on linen
Set up view of moon work in Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024) on the Farnsworth Artwork Museum, Rockland, Maine
Ann Craven, (left) “Dahlias (For the Yellow Moon, Cushing, Always), 2024-25” (2024-25); (proper) “Red Dahlias (For the Moon), 2022” (2022)
Set up view of moon work in Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024) on the Farnsworth Artwork Museum, Rockland, Maine. Left: “Dahlia’s (For the Pink Moon), 2023” (2023); proper: “Tree (Purple Beech, Spring Night Sky, Again, Again), 2024” (2024)
Ann Craven, “Peonies (Hit Song on Black with Pussy Willows), 2023” (2023), oil on canvas
Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024) continues on the Farnsworth Artwork Museum (16 Museum Road, Rockland, Maine) by January 4, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Jaime DeSimone.
