Craig Voligny

About the Artist

Born in Michigan's Upper Peninsula in 1974, Craig Voligny has since lived and worked widely in both the United States and East Asia, where he lived and worked for 20 years. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas. He has been a Fulbright Research Scholar of Painting, an Artist-in-Residence at Taiwan's National Tsinghua University and has exhibited internationally and nationally for over 25 years. At present, he lives in Rockport, Maine and spends each summer in Alaska, where he has a commercial fishing operation.

Craig is a primarily a "landscape painter" whose work aims to portray landscape as mystical experience. The forms and intangible elements he paints are extracted from his surroundings by direct observation; he then uses these as a point of departure to build his work through dichotic concepts of observation vs. imagination, object vs. image, simplicity vs. complexity, etc. This conflict is what drives his creative process and results in layered imagery of dense energetic mark making that portrays "landscape" in flux. Craig's work draws inspiration from Modernist and Classical East Asian painting traditions, as well as historical readings, fishing lures, stained glass windows, retail merchandising and maps.