Artist: Ann Craven
Title: From the series American Birds (endangered, extinct, after Audubon)
Year: 2018-2019
Dimension: 120 × 80 cm approx.
Technique: Oil on Canvas
Price: TBC
About the Artist
Born 1967. Lives and works in Cushing, Maine and New York, New York, United States of America
Solo exhibitions (among others)
2019
Ann Craven: Birds We Know, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME
Ann Craven, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL
2018
Sunset Moon, Karma, New York, NY
Ann Craven with Maccarone, ADAA, New York, NY
2017
Animals 1997 – 2017, Southard Reid, London
A Robin Singing, 2011, Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis, MO
2015
Untitled (Palettes: Naked, Tagged), 2013-14, Southard Reid, London
I Like Blue, Gallery Diet, Miami, FL
2014
Ann Craven, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, CA
TIME, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France
2013
Ann Craven, Maccarone, New York, NY
Hello Hello Hello, Southard Reid, London
2011
Reims Moon #1, 39 Great Jones, New York, NY
Conceptual Romantic, Conduits, ReMap3, Athens, Greece
2010
Flowers, Maccarone, New York, NY
Ann Craven, Blancpain Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland
What does this work say (to me)?
I need to say in the last, probably, five years I have been paying more and more attention to the painting of birds, some of them I have found very telling, beautiful, enigmatic and somehow fitting the current times very well.
When in front of this painting by Ann Craven I had to spend a certain amount of time taking it in, feeling it, trying to understand it although it eluded me. Of course, there is no way you can get art work completely not even if you receive the information directly from the artist’s lips. Part of the mystery will remain unveiled as the answer does not lay on the painter’s intentions or skills but on this plus on his/her soul and brain and those of the viewer combined.
And that is the magic of art… it is an open circle (in the best of the cases)
What fascinated me about this painting was the quotidian aspect of the subject (one bird feeding another, each of them on a branch) made extraordinary thanks to the presentation of the scene on a background which although related (flowers and leaves) is time and space alien to the reality of the birds’ situation which we perceive as normal in our minds.
Basically, something is not quite right.
And that something is the scale of the flowers and leaves, the blurriness of them, the acknowledgment after a while that what we see has something more to do with a human-created pattern than with a direct representation of nature.
It is that contradiction between artificial and real that creates that fracture of time and space alluding probably to the interest of the artist in representing birds that are either extinct or in the process of.
If this interpretation is correct the painting reaches a level of sadness explained by the fact that potentially what we are seeing is just the memory of what was, a disturbing reason for a pattern to reflect the beauty of it but burying on its way the sublime qualities of what just life can create.
In what Room to place it?
The painting is a bold one in colour and composition; hence it needs perspective, because of this I would place it as the focal point in a hall, room, or corridor.
Displaying it
As said before I think this painting demands space in between it and its viewer. Well lit, eye-level height.
This painting does not need a frame and if one is proposed has to be a box so to give air to the background. This should not be limited but allow it to expand and take over.
