CRAIG MOONEY

Craig Mooney’s roots in art go back to his youth. As a child growing up in Manhattan, Craig learned to exercise his natural abilities through sketching and painting. Craig’s first teacher was his father, a physician, but also a gifted artist in his own right.

Craig describes his current work as a form of impressionism with a contemporary bent. Purposefully ambiguous, he communicates with the viewer in the space that exists between the painting and the viewer’s impression of it. Details are generally left out. It is up to the viewer to decide what’s going on.  It’s the absence of these details that make the work valid and compelling.

Craig uses brushes and pallet knives to build form, gesture, and color into figures that exist within the picture plane, and linger in the memory. His work has been called dreamlike. His figures belong to something beyond photographic reality. They come from the refractive, blurred eye of the memory, of the sleeping mind. These paintings come from a reality that never existed, but is instantly recognizable.

His technique can also be described as gestural.  His work looks as if the paint is still wet on the canvas…as if these creations took shape in one short period.  Thick impasto layers of paint and bare canvas can inhabit the same space.

It is just this paradox that makes the work interesting.