2023Daniel S. Palmer

Many nights, Ann Craven paints en plein air to create exuberant depictions of the moon and sky. Documenting the lunar conditions she observes at a specific time and place, these canvases become the source for her larger monumental compositions. Painting in a lush, sensuous palette, Craven describes the moment just past as well as her memories and subjective personal experience. Ann Craven: Twelve Moons at the SCAD Museum of Art was her largest exhibition of these works to date. The display aimed to reveal both the serial nature of the artist’s larger endeavor and the myriad meanings the moon can convey. Collectively, the nearly eighty paintings in the show, all from 2022, chronicle a distinct chapter in her ongoing process of creatively and beautifully encapsulating the wonders of the natural phenomena that surround us.

For most artists, the selection of their subject is a struggle of determining what they will commit their life’s work to. When Craven began painting, she thoughtfully reframed this conundrum by focusing on the concepts of repetition and variation. The choice to paint moons and other infinitely variable natural subjects such as birds, animals, and flowers followed as a response to that interest in iteration. Since first painting the moon on Lincolnville Beach, near Camden, Maine, in 1995, Craven has been fascinated by the seemingly paradoxical nature of the earth’s satellite, with its observable phenomena defined by both regularity and fluctuations. She savors the idea that the moon is always present—one of the few reliable constants in life—but also that it appears differently from night to night and from place to place. The way the artist represents her subject as she sees it each night helps articulate its infinite variability. She also appreciates that every individual’s differing experiences and ideas of the moon demonstrate how we each make meaning from the unique subjective perspectives that color our realities.

So began a devotional relationship to the moon, with Craven a kind of enchanted worshiper. In her early days of adulation, as now, the artist would stay up late to make a series of paintings that might all look, to the uninitiated, pretty much alike. Family members called her a “lunatic” because of her unwavering adherence to the celestial body. Her decades-long commitment to the subject in the years since, and the overwhelmingly positive response from audiences, expresses resounding support for her dedication to painting the moon so faithfully.

Although most viewers fixate on the luscious and resolutely painterly qualities of her work, Craven’s brilliance lies in her equally deft handling of the formal structures that organize her works. It all begins with the standardized format with which she depicts the moon and night sky. Most nights the artist paints numerous small works on her fourteen-by-fourteen-inch canvases—slightly larger than a vinyl LP cover—to which she has been committed for more than two decades. She decided this would be the ideal size to balance the parameters of her round subject, provide enough context to convey the look and feel of each evening, and allow for packability for travel and archiving. This ever-faithful format has allowed the artist to maintain a standard she says she will retain for the rest of her career, without compromise.

The rigorous way Craven paints the moon from observation in each small canvas allows it to function as a visual diary, with the regularity of the format emphasizing variations on a theme. She creates these paintings outdoors, in the inky darkness of night, using the light reflected by her subject, occasionally with the aid of candlelight or a small headlamp. She sometimes paints a series of up to five canvases over the course of one night, building them over hours of work and finishing them fifteen to thirty minutes apart from each other to capture the changing light conditions. Other nights she may only create a single work. In order to paint in relative darkness, she consistently lines up her palette in the same way. This means that, using muscle memory, she can always find the colors she’s looking for, “the same way as a pianist plays the piano.”1 Her adeptness with her instrument is evident in her rich compositions, which evoke the feeling of how the moon appears in the night sky each evening—a state beyond realism that is equally alluring and descriptive.

The moon paintings display the subtleties of particular conditions in the nighttime sky, wherever in the world Craven finds herself, in ways that astronomers’ technical perspectives wouldn’t even begin to describe. The artist is a master of interpreting her subject—she elegantly portrays the shifting color gradations that alter the moon’s aura over the course of a night, as well as atmospheric and perceptual realities like the wind and haze that at times define her field of vision, ultimately conveying the emotion and experience of the night sky. Her work reminds us of how impossible it is to capture an accurate-seeming photograph of the moon, no matter how advanced the equipment. For those who have spent evenings gazing at the celestial body in the northeastern United States, where many of Craven’s paintings are set, these depictions are especially evocative. They help us recall specific nights we may have passed looking up at the night sky, and the feelings we had then come rushing back all at once.

While the regularity of Craven’s practice means that she creates numerous smaller works, she is particularly discerning about which nighttime paintings she will expand into larger compositions (also in standardized sizes) back in her studio. These larger-format works incorporate more of the surrounding landscape and elaborate on motifs from her smaller paintings. The enlarged field of vision incorporates branches and trunks where, in smaller works, only the trees’ outermost twigs and canopies would be visible flirting with the moon. The larger works also feature recurring sights that help root the compositions within her personal geography, such as the moon reflecting on the Saint George River, the tidal inlet that flows into the Atlantic Ocean, as seen from her summer retreat in Cushing, Maine, or the Hudson River, viewed from Lower Manhattan, New York, blocks from her city home and studio. The red blossoms of a cherry tree above her Tribeca rooftop locate us in April, their petals making the full Pink Moon all the rosier. In other works, trees are personified characters, emphasized by titles such as Moon (Glamorous Tree, Yellow January Crescent, Cushing), 2022 (2022); viewed from an oblique perspective, a rounded burl gives the tree the appearance of being pregnant. Occasionally, we spy cameos of her omnipresent and ever-friendly birds, or her dramatic and blustery “Crazy 8” clouds, and even moments of stark symbolism, as in Beaver Moon (Blood Eclipse, Yellow Light, Louise’s Stars, NYC), 2022 (2022), one in a series referencing the iconic five-pointed stars found in Louise Nevelson’s precious painting from the Farnsworth Art Museum’s collection, Maine Meadows, Old County Road (c. 1932–33).

In all their brushy lushness, Craven’s paintings vibrate fluidly between representation and abstraction. Of course, these pictures are depictions of naturalistic objects that are identifiable as such, but they lean toward the abstract through her unconstrained application of paint, sensuous use of color, and expressive brushwork. At moments, the looseness of Craven’s strokes make her works look like they could have been painted by an Abstract Expressionist. Her renderings of the moon, reduced to a slice or flat circle surrounded by a hazy aura, or the horizontal sweep of ripples of water, are so minimally described that they could easily be read as other forms altogether. While some paintings allude to scientific characterizations—in Hunter’s Moon (Windy Red Tree, Cushing), 2022 (2022), the artist illustrates oak leaves with proper attention to their variegation, symmetry, and lobes—Craven nevertheless interprets these kinds of natural forms with an economic simplicity, dissolving realism into color and gesture. As a result, her works toggle back and forth between naturalistic representation and abstraction with an almost slippery ease. This quality shows her deft ability as a painter, but it also reveals the nuances of our experiences as viewers. Humans innately search for recognizable forms in nature—a legacy of natural selection—trying to find shapes, especially faces, in randomness. We often fall prey to the allure of representation. But the magic trick of looking at paintings is that we can overcome these traps, too; we are able to look closely, analyze, and even find pleasure in the way the artist constructed the figure, revealing and finding meaning in the disruption of the deception when the illusion falls apart.

Craven’s exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art transformed the institution’s largest gallery into a panorama representing the twelve cycles of the moon over the course of the 2022 calendar year. A single painting, Harvest Moon (Quiet, Cushing), 2022 (2022)— aligned with the main axis of the museum’s former railroad warehouse structure—was visible to visitors upon their entrance to the museum. After walking through other exhibitions and arriving at the threshold of Craven’s show, the full extent of her paintings revealed themselves. Nearly eighty works were hung around the perimeter in the order that they were made. Accordingly, the layout of the show functioned as a lunar calendar of sorts. The works were methodically installed fourteen inches apart and sixteen inches from the corners of the gallery, centered at the same level, and stretching nearly three-hundred linear feet in total. Twelve fourteen-by-fourteen-inch moon paintings were installed above the exhibition’s introductory text on what the artist dubbed the “Curator’s Wall.” This group of works acted as a key, with one painting for each month. Craven sometimes captured the moon’s likeness multiple times over the course of each month, documenting with nuance its changing phases, from new to waxing, full to waning, and so on, with its various quarters, crescent, and gibbous intermediary steps in between the astonishingly dramatic full moons. In its linearity, the exhibition layout conveyed the intersecting and reiterative movements of multiple cosmic cycles: those of the moon, which revolves around the earth twelve times per year, and our planet’s three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day, five-hour, fifty-nine-minute, and sixteen-second orbit around the sun.2 While the lunar calendar and the solar calendar don’t align, they both mark time and organize our lives. Foregrounding these forces, Craven’s paintings unite us with the cosmic realities that may paradoxically make our lives feel small and yet simultaneously place any point in space (including ours at this moment) at the center of the universe, always in a state of perpetual renewal.

Craven’s year of moon paintings is truly the definition of an oeuvre—a body of work that is greater than the sum of its parts. The methodical installation of this series in Twelve Moons not only echoed the technical elements of the moon’s phases and orbit, but also reflected the conceptual and serial nature of Craven’s practice. The arrangement of paintings also contextualized her work within a less obvious art historical narrative, specifically recalling the compositional structures used in Conceptual art, or durational performances in which an artist performs a repetitive ritual again and again. Craven’s naming mechanisms—she includes the date, time, and location in each painting’s title, inscribed into still-wet paint on the lower-right corner of her canvases, and uses almanac names for full moons—further the comparison to artists such as On Kawara, whose influential Date Paintings mark time by recording his whereabouts according to a specific set of self-imposed guidelines. Craven’s paintings, rigorous yet celebratory, are her own, even more exuberant way of articulating “I am still alive.”3

Behind the central rear wall of the exhibition, two other related series of works were tucked away for inquisitive viewers. Craven’s Diptych (Stripe, 12 Moons) (2022), an uncharacteristically abstract work, reveals a special, not well-known part of her practice— and serves as another kind of key to the exhibition. Rather than using a painter’s palette, she intuitively mixes her colors on a canvas placed horizontally on a table. When she finishes a work, she applies the leftover paint in diagonal stripes, one color at a time, “with no decision-making,” to a sixty-by-forty-eight or twenty-four-by-eighteen-inch canvas. The resulting stripe paintings are a diaristic archive of her technique, but they are also bold, minimalist works, with the ribbons of oil paint allowing her to “see” her colors in an isolated formation. She also incorporates her moon paintings into the backgrounds of other, smaller works, such as the four still lifes flanking the stripe painting on the back wall of Twelve Moons. In these, we can recognize depictions of her moon paintings leaning against her studio wall, with a stool and glass vase of flowers placed in front of them. Using the moon paintings as backdrops—and thus including her canvases as subjects themselves within her paintings—for these arrangements, she creates a self-reflexive, almost meta gesture, producing a dynamic interrelation of foreground and background, day and night, earth and moon, and especially the outdoors of her environment and the indoors of the studio.

The exhibition’s maximalist display emphasized the complex relationships between Craven’s paintings and her process, highlighting the consistency and thoroughness of her concept. In contrast to the minimal presentations typical of commercial venues (in which the exclusivity and singularity of a work of art is often emphasized to enrich its value), the museum setting of Twelve Moons facilitated an enhanced engagement with Craven’s work. Organized in close consultation with the artist to encourage durational looking—both over the course of a single visit and multiple returns over months—the exhibition itself reflects her approach to art-making. Densely hung and thus focusing on small but significant iterations of a single subject, the uniquely completist installation plan functions as both a kind of condensed (albeit expansive) archive and a testament to the artist’s total commitment to a long-term project. Rather than rarefied and discrete, the work of art in Twelve Moons proliferates, multiplying beyond the gallery walls, into the artist’s studio, into the moonlight.

With its educational mission as a premier teaching museum of the Savannah College of Art and Design, the SCAD Museum of Art served as the perfect site for this exhibition, which was expressly created with the university’s students in mind. The presentation evinces Craven’s steadfast commitment to her painting practice, and her determination inspires students and the next generation of artists to approach their work with the same regularity and devotion. She has been painting moons for many years and will continue to do so long after this show, whether from Cushing, New York City, or elsewhere. Many young artists worry that they are supposed to sit down and somehow conceive a magnum opus, which can be a daunting, paralyzing barrier to even taking the first step. A natural teacher, Craven hoped that this exhibition would encourage students and artists of all types to make small gestures each day, and in doing so, to realize that they will soon have a sizable body of work as a result. They will cultivate their skill and confidence along the way. Creation is an act of becoming.

The universally symbolic nature of the moon unlocked other important meanings within the exhibition and gets to the essence of Craven’s practice. The moon elicits something different for everyone—reflecting our varied backgrounds and cultural heritages—but also speaks to all of us in powerful, poetic ways. We each have our own personal relationship with it, which may grow or diminish at different points in our lives, but always has the potential to evoke imagination. While Craven’s artistic interpretation does not prescribe a specific reading or symbolic meaning to the moon, other than highlighting its beauty and its influence on everything around us, its multiple significations and associations are ever-present. Some cultures view the moon as a symbol of feminine powers, a marker of rebirth and reincarnation, or interpret other mythologies and metaphors in its cycles and control of the tides and other natural phenomena. Entire swaths of the world’s population organize religious festivals and practices around the lunar calendar. Cultural references and homages to the moon abound, but one particularly relevant in the context of our exhibition in Georgia is the song “Moon River,” written by native Savannahian Johnny Mercer. Craven didn’t necessarily consider this dialogue when she began the moon paintings, but showing them in Savannah underscores a parallel between the crooner’s and her own relationship with the moon:

Moon river, wider than a mile

I’m crossing you in style someday

Oh, dream maker, you heartbreaker

Wherever you’re goin’, I’m goin’ your way

Two drifters, off to see the world

There’s such a lot of world to see

We’re after the same rainbow’s end

Waitin’ ‘round the bend

My huckleberry friend

Moon river and me

The most profound and uniting aspect of Craven’s Twelve Moons exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art is that the moon she portrays again and again is the same for each and every one of us. Through it, we are all connected; we all look up at the same big rock in the night sky. Craven’s is one of billions of perspectives. Although the moon is always present, every moment that we experience it over the course of our lives is as drastically different as each of Craven’s paintings is to the next. The moon that she paints is the same one her mother and father looked up at, the same one that you and I, and our friends, partners, and strangers on the other side of the world see, too. It is ever-present and ever-changing. Of course, time is a linear progression, but it also cycles back around. Craven’s exhibition returned from January to December, creating a space for the next year’s paintings to ostensibly come after. She keeps painting them, and will as long as she can, as predictably as the next phases and years will wax and wane too. It all goes on long after we are gone.

1 Ann Craven, lecture, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, March 1, 2023.

2 The moon completes its orbit around the earth in twenty-seven-point-three days, roughly the length of a lunar calendar month. While most years have twelve full moons, every two-and-a-half years a thirteenth (Blue Moon) is visible.

3 On Kawara’s series I Am Still Alive, which the artist began in 1970, consists of telegrams bearing the titular words sent to friends and acquaintances.