"A talent like hers only happens once in a generation." Hans Hofmann

click to tour Craig's work

"She has the most evident natural talent for drawing that I've ever seen." George Grosz.

No lover of contemporary American art will want to miss this most rare introduction to a superbly skilled, imaginative painter. With the introduction of Nancy Craig, a stunning talent joins the gallery.

Whether Nancy Craig is painting a great, tumultuous Amazon battle or a magnificent shell absolutely still on a deep blue ground, she paints with enormous strength and passion, capturing in her paintings the ultimate emotional charge. She enters into painting full force, as if the act of painting itself were another world, and the art she makes a tale of creation. Craig pursues several different series simultaneously. A recent series presents figures on horses or musicians and dancers on the beach, juxtaposed surrealistically with magnificent shells, almost trompe-l’oeil in appearance. For years, she has painted large epic themes, often shocking and violent, based on the great Greek myths, Amazon battles, abductions of virgins, Cronus eating his children. She is interested, she says, in extreme states. . .the shell magnificent in its extreme stillness...the battle – bloody, chaotic, the huge canvas straining with the aggressive energy of violent encounter. "I like subject matter that's either violent and shocking like childbirth or rich and traditional like nudes and abductions."

She paints from imagination, often beginning with poses recorded in her sketchbooks over the years. Many of her subjects are taken from Greek myth or the Renaissance iconography of such painters as Titian or Raphael. She is attracted to these epic themes, she says, because "the Greek myths embody extreme universal truths –"

And oddly enough, playing with the imagery of gods and goddesses, you begin to find they're more alive than you'd ever imagined. Zeus to the Greeks wasn't god of the sky, he was the blue sky itself; Venus not goddess of love but the carnal potency itself; and they actually seemed to be born again for me in almost exact proportion to each painting's belief.

Another ongoing series Craig calls "Renaissance Dream" paintings refers to the astonishing mystery and visual play of one-point perspective, first explored by early Renaissance painters

For Craig, painting is an active, physically exciting activity. The paint is loosely applied wet on wet. The figures emerge from fantastic, dream-like backgrounds to dominate the foreground with vigorous action. Even when the sea is calm, the boat steady, the fishermen seem invigorated with intent. Craig paints with such energy and intent, she has been known to complete a huge canvas in a few hours. She says, "I have to slow myself down. It takes days to prepare a canvas – building, stretching, sizing, priming – I need to make it last."

Craig has lived and worked in Truro for 30 years, going out into the world, as necessary, to complete portrait commissions. She is, in fact, an internationally renowned portraitist and has painted royalty and celebrity clients around the world. This talent as a portrait painter has provided a means of support for her, and that most desirable condition for the artist, the freedom to paint without concern for the business of art. There have been extended sojourns in Europe. Craig and her husband lived in Spain throughout much of the 70's and early 80's, while she painted many portraits. When she is home, she rides her bike every afternoon the 2 miles to the same studio she has had for 30 years and paints until the light fades. Even in winter, when there is snow on the ground and it is so cold she has to warm the paint on the little gas heater before she can begin, she paints.

"When I came to the Cape," she says, "it was a kind of rebirth. I felt liberated." Until she found her life as a painter, she was restless and out of place. Craig grew up in an influential family in the affluent town of Bronxville in Westchester County, New York, where she faced all the strictures of the social expectations for a young woman of that time and place. "I did the things I was supposed to do, I tried, but I could never complete them, I kept leaving and running off to something else."

Fortunately, Craig had attended a very progressive school as a child, a school developed on the Dewey system, where she was encouraged to express herself and her talents. She remembers often going to the art room for entire afternoons, drawing and painting. Even then she painted huge, rearing horses, bigger than life size. Later she attended Sweetbriar College in Virginia and Bennington in Vermont. At Bennington she was told it was her destiny to be a sculptor, but "all I ever really wanted to do was paint," she says. "I could always draw. It was like breathing for me. But I needed to learn the technique of painting – underpainting and glazes, these things." She studied at the Art Students' League in New York and the Académie Julien in Paris. She was a student of Edwin Dickinson and Hans Hoffman and Frederic Taubes.

At 26, Nancy Craig won the most important American prize for figurative painting: $3000 First, Benjamin Altman Figure Prize of the National Academy of Design. In those early years, she exhibited her work often and won many prizes. But the praise came too easily, and she felt a kind of an imposter in the art world. She needed the challenge of anonymity to develop. So she stopped exhibiting and secluded herself on Cape Cod. She exhibited for the first time in 20 years at the Forbes Gallery in New York in 1995. Before that, in 1975, she exhibited at the Galaria Betica in Madrid. In the 60's, she exhibited at the influential Graham in New York. Last season at Berta Walker Gallery, Craig was represented in an extraordinary group exhibition of accomplished Figurative Expressionists. This exhibition, which includes the full continuum of her astonishing range, introduces Craig as a gallery artist.

Craig's paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Baltimore Museum, the New Britain (Conn.) Art Institute, among others. She was awarded the First Benjamin Altman Figure Prize from the National Academy of Design; Gold Medal, Allied Artists; Ranger Fund Purchase, National Academy of Design; Mary E. Karasick Portrait Prize, National Association of Women Artists; Julien F. Detmer Award for best oil painting, Hudson Valley Show, and many others honors and prizes. She is listed in Who's Who in America; Dictionary of International Biography, Two Thousand Women of Achievement; and Who's Who in American Women.