David J. Craven

Painter David Craven has explored a diverse range of visual styles through his 40 years of practice engaged in a kind of public experimentation. He became known early in his career for his abstracts: the Arabesque paintings (1974-75), composed with wide swaths of black acrylic paint applied with squeegees and tile scrapers, and Black Wall Skins (1979) of collaged panels, painted together. In the 1980s, after moving to New York City, Craven's work took a figurative turn, featuring heavily caked black-and-white heads and hands crowded into panels of interlocking plywood. Subsequently returning to abstraction, his more recent work is highly graphic and map-like, with networks of lines, dots, and occasionally text appearing against a white ground. Recent small pieces such as OMG (2009) reference the practices and circuitry of contemporary digital communications. Craven continues to exhibit regularly in Canada as well as his adopted U.S. homeland, particularly in New York and Toronto. His work appears in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and other public and private institutions from coast to coast.