CUSHING — The half moon is a smudge in the night sky.

Three easels stand side by side on Ann Craven’s lawn on the bank of the St. George River. The artist studies the canvases.

“What time is it?” she asks.

I look at my watch and read the time out loud.

“9:22 p.m.”

In quick brushstrokes, Craven scrawls the time and date on the back of the first painting to mark it as done. Twice more, she asks the question. Twice more, she documents the answer on the back of a canvas.

Craven always timestamps her paintings. If we lined them up in chronological order, we would see a sort of diary. She first painted the moon on Lincolnville Beach in 1995. Did she know then that she would revisit this subject maybe thousands of times over 30 years?

“I knew it,” she says.

She comes from a family of roofers in Massachusetts who must have seen the moon rising over their job sites a time or two. They were Catholic and understood ritual. Her grandfather used to call her a “lunatic,” a little pun that made them both laugh. Then he’d say, “Keep it going,” so she did. Craven puts on her mother’s Boston accent: “If you want to paint the moon, it’s yahs.” They are gone now, but the moon keeps rising, and Craven keeps painting it.

The walls of her studio in Cushing are dotted with pieces of tape she has used as labels.

“July Pink Moon 30 x 30”

“January Wolf Moon”

“June Strawberry Moon”

“I leave them there as ghosts, as little memories of what I was painting,” Craven says.

On this particular July day, she wasn’t sure the moon would make an appearance. The forecast had threatened a thunderstorm. But the evening stays dry, so she props the easels in the yard right next to her studio. Her paintings, including those on view in three Maine museums this summer, are often quite large. But she always starts with these small studies, working on multiple canvases at the same time as the moon rises.

“It happens so fast,” Craven explains. “There are so many changes.”

She sets up for the night. She squeezes paint out of tubes. She orders the colors in the same rainbow as always on her palette. She always knows where to find the one she wants, even when the light has faded. She lights tea lights and short candles as the sky darkens.

“Oh my gosh,” she gasps when she steps outside the studio. The sky is cobalt, and the moon is there. It is 8:49 p.m. — time to paint.

Craven mixes red and white for pink. She makes a half circle on each canvas. She starts on the easel in the middle, then the left, then the right.

“It’s a real half moon,” she says as she fills the sky with a deep blue.

Craven will paint like this from one to five hours on a given night. She might start at 9 p.m. or 3 a.m. These studies will not wait long — a few days, maybe — before she will translate them onto larger canvases. She’ll probably work at night because it just doesn’t feel right to paint the moon when the sun is up. Just as these three canvases will not look exactly the same, neither will the bigger one.

But making a copy isn’t the point. Making a memory is.

“It’s a sibling of the same moment,” Craven says.

She moves from one canvas to the next and back again. She runs into her studio for another tube of manganese violet or another spritz of bug spray.

“There is something really interesting going on there that I want to capture,” Craven mutters as she forms the clouds with a fan brush. They are thickening, and in one painting, the moon is more obscured by the fog than in the other two. “Should I do this with the other one? I think I should. It’s here, it’s now. Yeah, it’s gotta be.”

She moves two candles to her easel to illuminate the canvas. A firefly flares in the grass. I will think about this moment for weeks — the here, the now.

“What time is it?” she asks.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020-2024)”
WHERE: Farnsworth Art Museum, 16 Museum St., Rockland
WHEN: Through Jan. 24, 2026
HOURS: Wed.-Mon. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (through April)
ADMISSION: $20 adults, $18 seniors (65 and over), $10 students (17 and over), Free for Rockland residents and children 16 and under
INFO: 207.596.6457, farnsworthmuseum.org

WHAT: “Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory)”
WHERE: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 9400 College Station, Brunswick
WHEN: Through Aug. 17
HOURS: Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Thurs until 8:30 p.m.) and Sun. 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
ADMISSION: Free
INFO: 207.725.3275, Bowdoin.edu

WHAT: “Spotlight: Ann Craven”
WHERE: Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland
WHEN: Through Sept. 14
HOURS: Wed./Thurs. and Sat./Sun. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Fri. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
ADMISSION: $20 adults, $18 seniors and students 22+, free for members and visitors 21 and under, free to all Fri. 4 to 8 p.m.
INFO: 207.775.6148, portlandmuseum.org