My Ann Craven

Anne Collins Goodyear

Every poet is salted with fire. A poet is a mirror, a transcriber. Here ‘we have salt in ourselves and peace one with the other.’
      —Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, 1985^[1]

Ann Craven attends closely to the words she connects with her compositions. “The titles are poems,” she explains. “They are intimate, quiet poems.”^[2] Here she refers to the descriptions she appends to her renditions of moons. Aptly described by one critic as “Craven’s Mont Sainte-Victoire,” the moon has long been central to her art.^[3] Through thousands of works and numerous dedicated exhibitions over the past three decades, Craven has made the subject her own.

Describing the importance of this glowing orb for her practice, Craven recounts:

It really made sense to grab it when I was searching for content in my work as a young artist. I have always painted from life, from observation, en plein air. That’s how I learned how to paint, by looking. So the moon, its continual waxing and waning, its coming back to life every month to be full and vital, it seemed like the right subject matter in my pursuit of a conceptual practice.^[4]

The reliable—even rhythmic—rebirth of the moon has important bearing on Craven’s relationship with it. In the very volume of the painter’s renditions of this subject, we discern evidence of her “salting with fire,” to paraphrase Susan Howe, a poet long admired by Craven. After exhibiting 101 moons in 1995 at her first solo exhibition—an installation that Craven describes as “one long poem”—the emerging artist suffered a catastrophic conflagration in 1999 that destroyed her home and studio.^[5] Reeling from the loss, Craven revisited her upbringing for inspiration: “My grandfather always said, ‘Just keep it going; keep it going.’ He was a roofer from Boston, so he was also repeating: putting roofing shingles on top of other shingles, always the same material. He taught me the notion of just not giving up.”^[6] In 2001, Craven returned to the night sky. By 2006, a decade after her first show of lunar views, she had 400 new such works. Internalizing her grandfather’s mantra, the artist repeated each of these paintings, producing a second set of 400 paintings of the moon. The simultaneous exhibitions of both groups in New York and Cincinnati emphasized the feat.

In undertaking this project, the artist may also have ruminated on early encouragement offered by her mother, who urged the budding painter to do multiple renditions of the same image. “Meanwhile,” Craven recalls, “we would be listening to Johnny Cash and Dean Martin, she would play certain songs on repeat, and have me sit up at the speaker and listen to their breathing between the words.”^[7] If, as the artist would have it, “The act of reproducing something over and over was already in my blood,” so too was a deep sensitivity to the space in between each iteration, the interval itself that offers definition and purpose to each act, like the geographical distance between two cities, the pause between two breaths, or the trough between waves.^[8] Driven initially to duplicate her work by an almost physiological impulse, the spiritual and emotional implications of the practice ultimately proved most meaningful for Craven. Comparing the activity to prayer, the artist reflects: “I can covet something and hold it close but not worry it’s going to go away. There is love in a repeated brushstroke—like revisiting a poem or a book.”^[9]

Craven’s invocation of language to describe her sustained recourse to her painted imagery deserves our attention, for words represent a critical aspect of each of the artist’s lunar compositions. Referring to her deliberate construction of titles, Craven emphasizes that each begins with “Moon.”^[10] Following this moniker, however, is a distinct phrase, enclosed by parentheses, which themselves resemble in their graphic form the shape of the waning and waxing crescent of the moon, or, taken together, its wholeness. “So much happens in the parentheses,” notes Craven.^[11] It is indeed within this space—the space in between—that each moon distinguishes itself from another, offering its own set of personal, temporal, and geographic associations.

Within cocoon-like brackets Craven dispenses diaristic observations. “I’m [mapping] my life and where I’ve been,” the artist notes. “It’s going to be one long story. One long poem.”^[12] Through a structure of continuity, then, personal evolution can reveal itself: “[The moon] is never the same,” Craven reflects: “It allows me to see my own changes.”^[13] It is not surprising, then, that over the last two decades Craven has carefully preserved her lunar paintings. The artist houses her fourteen-inch-square compositions within fifteen-by-fifteen-inch cardboard cubes (Figure 1). Larger works, including her twenty-four-by-eighteen-inch canvases, similarly painted en plein air, and more monumental works, generated from the smaller source images, are also included within the compendium that the artist describes as her moon “laboratory.” Each is added to its proper box, with sequential illustrated labels charting the ongoing progression of the painter’s work.

If a “laboratory” suggests experimentation, it also conveys precision, a characteristic of Craven’s study of the moon. Describing the artist’s practice, curator Jay Sanders marvels at the multiple canvases she simultaneously employs to capture the moon’s transit. “The moon moves so fast,” Craven explains, “you gotta catch it. And I can’t just work on one canvas because I’d cancel myself out and cover up all the marks that I would want to leave as a record of my own trajectory, of what I was witnessing.”^[14] The artist’s rigor manifests itself in her paintings for The Paris Review. To determine where to position herself on the roof of the magazine’s headquarters to create this series, Craven calculated the latitude and longitude of the moon’s ascent above the rooftops of Manhattan, reflecting: “I’m grabbing time. Holding it.”^[15]

This active marshaling of temporality plays out in Craven’s laboratory in her New York studio. Resting on a scaffolding of shelves (see figure 1), each container functions much like the parenthetical clauses in the titles of the works they protect. In the duration it conveys—both that of the moon’s rapid transit across the sky and that of its human chronicler—the compilation recapitulates the marks that comprise the paintings themselves, reiterating, as the artist observes, that a “brushstroke [itself] can convey time.”^[16] Indeed, reflecting upon the larger significance of this body of work, which can be measured quantitatively by its remarkable scale—of years, of size (both intimate and large), and of constituent pieces, Craven notes: “This project is a continuum rather than a series, because a series seems to always have an end. . . . For me, this doesn’t have an end.”^[17]

In building a self-reflexive body of work, then, Craven constructs a cyclical structure that resists finite temporal limits. Her ambitions are mirrored in the development of her compositions, which move from palette, to completed canvas, to tertiary stripe composition fashioned from the remaining paint. The spiritual significance of this three-part process, which conducts her compositions from birth to maturity to afterlife, is not lost on the artist, who grew up in a Catholic—if non-dogmatic—household.^[18]

Craven’s abiding interest in the eternal also finds expression in several recent lunar canvases brandishing clouds in the form of a figure eight: the symbol for infinity (Figures 2 and 3). Emphasizing the importance of the configuration are nine related paintings created in October 2023, all named with some variant of the term Crazy 8, one even stressing the repetition with the term again. While the sheer number of the canvases in the Crazy 8 series demonstrates the artist’s fascination with the natural phenomenon, her creation of precisely nine—or three times three—renditions of this particular night sky is intriguing, especially when one realizes that the number nine can itself refer to something “asquint” or “askew.”^[19] 

With her prominent use of the terms Crazy 8 or Crazy 8’s in these fall 2023 canvases, Craven invites the viewer to read symbolic significance into the numbers associated with this series. Can it be a coincidence that she included exactly eighty-eight works in her Twelve Moons exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design earlier the same year?^[20] While Craven’s invocation of Crazy 8’s might conjure up associations with a card game, it also brings to mind the lunacy long associated with the moon (“luna” in Latin). But the series equally recalls another painting concerned with a sort of “madness”: Marsden Hartley’s Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane (1933), in which not only the moon, but also the numerals 3, 8, and 9 feature prominently, each figure replete with symbolic significance (Figure 4).^[21] A detailed account of the complex iconography of this fabled American painting lies beyond the scope of this essay. ^[22] But it is worth observing, in view of the date and time with which Craven commonly marks her lunar paintings, that Hartley’s use of the number 33 on the canvas of the ship’s sails may refer, in part, to the year in which the work was painted. In turn, the Eight Bells of the work’s title, reiterated by the clanging gong in the foreground, points to the hour of twelve noon—signified in the work’s inclusion of the orange sun.

Yet another feature of Hartley’s canvas deserves our attention: two triangular “clouds” suggestive of the soaring Gothic towers of the Brooklyn Bridge lauded by Crane in his epic poem The Bridge.^[23] Fittingly, Hartley’s allusion to this architectural marvel binds the composition to his home state of Maine through its implicit reference to the structure’s granite building blocks, quarried from Vinalhaven Island—a place near Craven’s home on the banks of the St. George River.

Visions of an awe-inspiring overpass likewise inform Craven’s Crazy 8s. Just six weeks after creating this series, the artist turned her attention to rendering the linear cables and one of the long, lanky towers of the Zakim Bridge in Boston (Figure 5), the artist’s childhood home. Strong formal connections with the autumnal tree that immediately preceded it on Craven’s canvases suggest a thematic link between the bodies of work. Vaulting the heavens even as it spans the Charles River, the construction evokes a personal and spiritual transition. Craven hints at such an interpretation with her characterization of its ongoing significance: “I really use that moment of memory and courage to take me to a different dimension [of my practice].”^[24]

Waterways, both literal and implied, appear frequently in Craven’s paintings of moons. “I am sitting on the banks of the Saint George River in Cushing, Maine,” she tells one interviewer. “I am looking at the high tide, and I smell jewelweed and salty water.”^[25] “Here,” we might conclude, returning to Howe, who quotes a Biblical parable of personal growth and regeneration: “‘we have salt in ourselves and peace with the other.’”^[26] Indeed, with rhythmic combinations of lines and colors, these brackish surfaces, which mirror the glowing spheres above them, testify to a sort of reciprocity: the satisfaction of seeing and being seen. Craven reiterates this affirming dynamic in her paintings of what she describes as “a tree with the moon coming through like an eye.”^[27] Echoing René Magritte’s Le Banquet (1957) (Figure 6), a composition the artist reiterated across multiple canvases, Craven’s renditions of a Purple Beech signal their own implicit richness. “In a way,” muses Craven, “that’s why I revisit paintings, to be conscious of what I was doing at that moment and why. It’s sort of like visiting an old friend.”^[28] Within her compositions one discovers a veritable feast of nurturing interpersonal and intergeneration interconnections. They radiate outward, like so many beams of light, from the trials and triumphs of the creative process, here understood not as an activity bound in time, but as a state of being, a state of grace.

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^[1] Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New York: New Directions, 2007 [1985], 7. Through its title this essay acknowledges Ann Craven’s fondness for Howe’s study of Dickinson as well as Howe’s own poetry. (Howe has contributed her own work to two previous catalogues of Craven’s work: Ann Craven and Regie Burrows Hodges: Moons and Angels [New York: Karma Books, 2022] and Ann Craven: Night [New York: Karma Books, 2024].) It also aspires to channel Howe’s ethos of exploration, characterized both by a deep sensitivity to Dickinson’s voice and to the larger historical and creative context occupied by both subject and author.  

 

^[2] Ann Craven, conversation with the author, January 22, 2025.

^[3] Greg Lindquist, “Ann Craven: Twelve Moons,” Brooklyn Rail (April 2023): https://brooklynrail.org/2023/04/artseen/Ann-Craven-Twelve-Moons/.

^[4] Ann Craven, quoted in Suzette McAvoy, “Ann Craven: Chasing the Moon,” Decor Maine 4 (2023): 56.

^[5] Craven shared this characterization of her 1995 New York show at Lauren Wittels Gallery in a conversation with the author January 22, 2025. Her response to the 1999 fire, which took place when she was out of town, is detailed in Osman Can Yerebakan, “Ann Craven,” BOMB (November 29, 2023): https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2023/11/29/ann-craven-interviewed/.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Ann Craven in Jay Sanders, “Inner Sightseeing,” in Ann Craven: Night (New York: Karma, 2023), 11.

^[8] Yerebakan, “Ann Craven.”

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Craven, conversation with the author, January 22, 2025.

^[11] Craven, conversation with the author, October 24, 2024.

^[12] Craven, conversation with the author, January 22, 2025.

^[13] Ibid.

^[14] Craven, “Inner Sightseeing,” 16.

^[15] Craven, conversation with the author and Jaime DeSimone, October 8, 2024.

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] Ann Craven, quoted in Matt Keegan, “‘Straight to the moon, Alice! Straight to the moon!’” in Ann Craven: Shadows Moon and Abstract Lies (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2009), 36.

^[18] Craven, email to the author, March 2, 2025.

^[19] David C. Ward, “‘Thou Bringest Tally’: Marsden Hartley’s Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane,” PN Review 158, vol. 30, no. 6 (July–August 2004): 23; and Oxford English Dictionary.

^[20] Yerebakan, “Ann Craven.”

^[21] As Ward clarifies, Hartley purposely sought to create a composition with a “very mad look” to it. Ward, “‘Thou Bringest Tally,’” 21.

^[22] See ibid. for a valuable overview of the work’s symbolic content.

^[23] Ibid., 27.

^[24] Craven, email to the author, March 2, 2025.

^[25] Ann Craven, quoted in Julia Halperin, “Maine Is a New Art-World Hotspot. Here Is Painter Ann Craven’s Guide to the Scene,” Cultured (July 31, 2024): https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2024/07/31/guide-to-maine-arts-ann-craven-artist.

^[26] Here Howe quotes Mark 9:50.

^[27] Ann Craven in dir. Elettra Fiumi, Ann Craven: In the Moonlight (Fiumi Studios, 2025), 13 min.

^[28] Ann Craven in Lois Dodd, “It’s Going to Take Some Time,” in Ann Craven: Animals Birds Flowers Moons (New York: Karma, 2021), 45.