Maccarone is proud to announce a survey exhibition of the watercolors of Ann Craven.

Craven’s prolific, serial output manifests here with an exploration of the artist’s accumulating watercolors from 2005-2010. Overlapping the subject matter of her oil paintings, their imagery includes flowers, cats, birds and owls – Craven’s menagerie. In contrast to the studied refinement of her oil painting, her watercolors emphasize an intuitive improvisational method yielding charged, haunting images. In each series, Craven’s brushwork records changes in her response to the subject as she moves from work to work. Craven utilizes the medium of watercolor as a laboratory of psychological exploration, producing works that speak through vibrant color and virtuosic execution.

Included in the exhibition is Craven’s series comprised of Pensées (pansies) – executed while the artist was in residency in France – a flower given its name for its likeness to the human face and one that possesses a litany of artistic usage throughout history. Craven’s pensées act as a lengthy portrait of the human spirit.

As the watercolors are publically shown for the first time, Craven reasserts her well-known affinity for oil paint with the inclusion of two new large works portraying deer, a revisit of her Young Buck from 2005. Inspired by the 1970’s film Soylent Green in which an elderly man before being euthanized sees a vision of a grazing deer in a pastoral field, Craven isolates the center buck from the scene, placing the animal within an even lusher environment of daisies igniting an emerald field.

Craven’s enduring repetition of imagery is a culmination of personal impulses and conceptual conceits. This array of watercolor exemplifies her larger rigorous working process while generously sharing the more intimate incarnations in her wide-ranging iconography.