ROCKLAND, Maine — For artist Ann Craven, capturing the essence of flora, fauna, and the nighttime sky through her paintings serves as a reflection of life’s cyclical nature. Approximately thirty years ago, she embarked on a series documenting moonrises from a beach in Maine, which culminated in a solo exhibition featuring 101 en plein air moon paintings. This motif has since become a signature element of her body of work, with the moon-themed pieces serving as the radiant spine of her mid-career retrospective, Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024), hosted at the Farnsworth Art Museum.
The exhibition debuted in May alongside a series of exhibitions across various Maine institutions, honoring Craven as the recipient of the 2025 Maine in America Award. This celebration includes three sequential presentations of her moon paintings at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and a brief showcase at the Portland Museum of Art. Painted Time comprises 30 expressive, wet-on-wet oil paintings crafted during the past four tumultuous years, starting from the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. The exhibition is divided into sections showcasing moons, trees, flowers, and birds — themes that Craven often revisits, meticulously recreating her past works. This rigorous practice of replication was born from the loss of nearly her entire artistic portfolio in a studio fire in 1999, which prompted her to reconstruct some pieces from memory. Today, this ethos of remaking underpins her artistic journey.
With each ‘“revisitation,” as Craven describes her re-imaginings, she taps into her past movements to replicate the same marks, generating the same compositions repeatedly, akin to a dancer practicing familiar choreography. These recurring gestures render her canvases as vessels of memory. Additionally, she incorporates another archival layer by preserving the canvases that serve as her palettes, stained with patches of paint, illustrations, and handwritten notes, embedding diary dates and details into titles, exemplified in “Untitled (Trees, Portraits, 11-24-24 to 12-24-24)” (2024). Through this unique creative-archival methodology, Craven cultivates muscle memory and fortifies her practice against loss and amnesia.
Viewing a collection of Craven’s replicated pieces evokes a game of “spot the difference.” When exhibited side by side, her monumental robin paintings exhibit identical palettes and compositions: Each piece illustrates a bird on a branch, surrounded by a whimsical blend of verdant foliage and delicate blossoms. Yet, tiny variations in the brushstrokes unveil subtle nuances. Every repetition brings something new. Here, as in nature, transformation is an incessantly generative cycle.
Yet, it is the moons that steal the spotlight in this exhibition. Over half of the artworks focus on lunar themes: golden moons embraced by wispy clouds, pale pink moons punctuated by branches, bouquets of dahlias cradled by yellow moons, and apricot moons adorned with luminous rings merging into ocean currents. A film shown in an adjacent space captures the artist creating on a rooftop in New York City at night, with three easels illuminated by candlelight. As the moon ascends, the clouds drift, and the colors of the night sky fluctuate. Each brush stroke Craven applies seeks to capture these ephemeral experiences with the profound reverence of a poet whispering a prayer to the universe.
In Painted Time, Craven harnesses the moon’s immortal presence within collective memory, portraying its celestial glow and cyclical return as a steadfast source of comfort and a blueprint for evolution: the moon recedes to a sliver as tree branches stand bare, yet they always sprout anew, heralding a fresh start.
Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024) is on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum (16 Museum Street, Rockland, Maine) until January 4, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Jaime DeSimone.
