|  | |
New Haven artist Megan Craig shares her perceptions of urban landscapes awash with the "rural sprawl" of floral life in her exhibition continuing through October 22 at the Good News Cafe and Gallery.
The title of Craig's show and current series of paintings, "this is the garden," is drawn from the opening line of a poem by the late E.E. Cummings: "this is the garden: colors come and go,/frail azures fluttering from night's outer wing/strong silent greens serenely lingering/absolute lights like baths of golden snow."
"These paintings have to do with urban places being overtaken by trees and flowers a rural sprawl," Craig observed. "They deal with expanses of color, whether sky, water or foliage."
Since she began painting cityscapes in 1998, Craig's works in oil on wood and canvas have evolved from miniature studies of New York City rooftops "that could be carried through a subway turnstile or stuffed in a pocket" to paintings of varying scales "drawing from doodles, sketches, memory, on-site studies and lines of prose." She said her early work in New York, which flourished as she pursued studies to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, remains "the backbone of my work."
"Painting rooftops was a way of deciphering the maze of the city, making additional space and working with shapes that fit my flat, broad brushstrokes," she recalled. "The city provided raw material for thinking about the ambiguity between abstraction and figuration, and gave me a host of compositions that complicated and often defied my expectations about perspective."
Craig's later works range from "tiny to monumental" in size, and her artistic focus also has shifted over time.
"I'm still thinking about rooftops, views from above and the geometry of the city, but now I am also thinking about the features that make up a particular place, what it means to occupy a space, and how to make a painting that feels inhabitable," she said. "I've been thinking about the difference between real and imagined places, and what it means for a place to disappear or to exist only in memory."
Craig explained her new series of paintings builds on her experience in interpreting cityscapes, while introducing rural and floral themes that have brought an underlying sense of tension to her recent works.
"Like the rooftops and tabletops I've been working on, these also have to do with clutter, edges and how things stack or balance," she said. "Some of the paintings in this group work in multiples like giant storyboards.
"They are all pictures of imagined places or scenarios where something urban and something rural have come into contact pictures of a tension between city and country," she added. "They are also about rootedness, depth and finding a way of growing up and down at once."
Craig's new exhibition at Good News Cafe marks the latest in an active schedule of solo and group shows of her works at galleries, museums, universities and other venues in the Northeast and other locations. She has staged previous solo exhibitions at the Donna Tribby Fine Art gallery in West Palm Beach, Fla.; art galleries in Neuenhaus and Lingen, Germany; the Weir Farm arts center in Wilton; and the Mark Potter Gallery at the Taft School in Watertown. During 2007 she has participated in group shows in New Haven and Westport, and over the past 10 years she also has shown her works in exhibitions in New York, Connecticut, North Dakota and Rhode Island.
After earning her bachelor's degree at Yale University in 1997, Craig embarked on her artistic career while continuing graduate studies in philosophy at the New School culminating in receipt of her doctoral degree earlier this year. She currently teaches at Stony Brook University in New York, and previously has been an instructor at the New School, Eugene Lang College, the Rhode Island School of Design and Parsons School of Design.
Craig has served as an artist in residence and visiting artist at a number of arts centers and schools in Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and New York. She pursues her artistic work at her studio in New Haven.
|
