Ann Craven

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.

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.