Claude Monet had his haystacks and the imposing façade of Rouen cathedral. Cézanne had his Mont Sainte-Victoire. On Kawara had his “date paintings,” which catalogued sans affect dates in time wherever in the world he found himself. Seriality has been a staple of art for centuries. One could even talk about Rembrandt here, with the obsessive self-portraiture that chronicled his aging process.

Seriality is the principal conceptual underpinning of Ann Craven’s work. The artist is best known for her moon paintings, which chart her experience of witnessing the moon’s rising and setting, which she paints on the rooftop of her New York studio and at her home on the St. George River in Cushing. These and other serialized works are being featured at three Maine museums right now: The Farnsworth Art Museum’s “Ann Craven: Painted Time (through Jan. 4, 2026), Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s “Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory)” (through Aug. 17), and the Portland Museum of Art’s “Spotlight: Ann Craven” (through Sept. 14).

The Big Picture

The shows were sparked by the Farnsworth’s Maine in America Award, which honors an artist each year who has had an enduring impact on Maine arts and culture. Craven is the 2025 recipient, a commendation accompanied by an exhibition at the venerable Rockland museum. But the larger collaboration deepens our understanding of the artist’s work by elucidating the centrality of Craven’s conceptual framework, which is, of course, based on repetition, but also a lot of preparatory research. For instance, Craven meticulously charts the phases and locations of the moon to determine the kind of moon (Beaver moon, Buck moon, Blood moon and so on) she wants to paint and exactly when and in what stage (waxing, waning, etc.).

The Farnsworth’s show is not solely about Craven’s moons, as it is divided into four rooms, each featuring a single subject matter: serial paintings of moons, flower still lifes, a purple beech tree on her Cushing property, and birds. Yet the moon continues to be the protagonist throughout most of these. A video shows her working on one of the purple beech tree paintings, for instance, and it’s instructive to see that before she paints the tree, Craven fully articulates the moon and sky, then paints the black limbs over it. This accounts for the intense presence of the moon that filters preternaturally through the tree.

Each serialized subject has a personal resonance for Craven. The tree itself she describes as a witness to time and memory — perfectly still and constant while everything swirls around it in temporal time and space. The flowers are always set in a cut crystal vase that belonged to her grandmother, atop a stool made by a friend. The bird paintings are inspired by an ornithology book Craven discovered after her grandmother died. The moon is absent in these last paintings, but within the context of the installation, there is a way that we can still sense its presence. Behind the trees and flowers works, however, are the same fully articulated moonscapes.

This proves superbly effective with the beech tree paintings. The flowers are a bit more problematic aesthetically. The blossoms themselves are usually quite bright, sometimes bordering on garish in their colors, and the moonscapes behind them are also brightly colored, more often than not in a different, unrelated palette. This sets up a tension between foreground and background, which isn’t always a bad thing (at the PMA, a vase of winter asters shares its palette with the background, so that the tension is still there, but feels more harmonious). When the colors do not sync, however, these paintings can feel almost like two separate works uncomfortably wedded together to create an aura of dissonance and clash.

The bird paintings can also appear almost sentimentally kitsch at times, though her three paintings of a pair of birds on a branch bear titles whose wit and humor salvage them from this fate: “I’m Sorry with Yellow Orchids,” “So Sorry (Love Hearts with Cherries)” and “Wasn’t Sorry (Looking, On Black, with Cherries).” This points up another concept behind Craven’s work — that of viewing the series as poems about certain intervals of time and experience in her life. She has also said that she thinks of all the paintings as one long poem that constitutes a record of her life. The sequencing certainly creates a cadence (or stanzas, if you will). And viewing the three shows together transmits this idea of a life of perpetual observation, where Craven marks the seconds, minutes, hours and days that compose a life.

Focusing on Process

Bowdoin’s show was conceived as three installations that would rotate through the summer. The first iteration was curated by the museum’s co-director Anne Collins Goodyear. A second rotation by Jay Sanders, the executive director and chief curator of Artists Space in New York, came down two days ago, and today the final version, this one curated by Adam Weinberg, director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, opens.

The central element in all three is a grouping of metal shelves bearing boxes, each containing all the moon paintings Craven does in a given month, 12 boxes denoting a year and, all together, a full span of four years. Craven paints anywhere from three to five 14-inch-by-14-inch canvases at a time, finishing each one in a single sitting. The shelves emphasize the conceptual, process-oriented approach the artist takes—the “Laboratory” of the title—which results in a kind of night-to-night journal of her experience. Some of these serve as inspirations for larger canvases, but mostly they represent a way she can return to the memory of each experience of the moon. It’s an intriguing device.

Of course, this also means there are a lot of paintings. And any time you have such prolific quantity, there will be unevenness. Some of the works are wonderful, while others can just feel repetitive. This is how it must be, of course. We probably would not call every single Monet painting of a haystack a masterpiece either. More importantly, Craven isn’t after making a breathtaking image each and every time. She is after a far larger perspective: a tangible, visual record of time. So, you will like some and walk by others unmoved.

Craven also builds symbolism into her works. For example, clouds in the form of “crazy eights” represent the idea of infinity, time without end. She is also turning the idea of plein air painting inside out. Originally a way of capturing a single moment on canvas, Craven manages to capture a string of moments we can feel morphing and moving as we pass each picture. It is like individual celluloid frames of a movie, or the pages of a flip-book that seem to come alive when you quickly riffle through them.

Focused Perspective

The Portland Museum of Art’s Craven installation is just four paintings. But it is a wonderful coda to the other shows. The four works are all fully realized and larger in scale. After the profusion of images at the other two shows, there is something calming about standing in the midst of a sharply edited viewpoint. There seems to be just enough color, just enough form, and just enough space to appreciate each without the distraction of 20 other adjacent images.

Of course, we do not have the sense of cadence and morphing time. And if someone begins their tour of the shows here, they will not comprehend the conceptual nature of Craven’s intent. We can, however, see the difference between the degrees of tension in the flower paintings mentioned above, and understand how it can be effective or less so.

“Dahlias (For the Yellow Moon, Cushing, Again) has pink, orange and red dahlias in the foreground, while the moonscape behind it is blue and yellow. This is not quite as jarring as some flower works in the Farnsworth, but we can sense the competition for our attention between foreground and background. On the other hand, in “Purple Asters (For the Moon, 8-30-23, 9PM, Cushing),” flowers, moon and sky share a more harmonious palette, thus evening out the conflicting friction of the other work in a way that feels quieter, more still and meditative — a Buddhist monk to the other painting’s Las Vegas showgirl, if you will.

Cumulatively, the exhibitions reveal a midcareer painter in her prime. It will be interesting to see how Craven’s art changes as she continues to mature.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland and can be reached at jorge@jsarango.com. This column is supported by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.

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