Collection: Mary Elaine

Photo Credit - Kitty Leaken

Craig Anderson's - personal art work to be revealed has been created over a lifetime of daily studio art practice. Anderson's carnival of color is brought to paintings, collages, assemblages, and drawings that demonstrates a world of tussling characters that inhabit a constellation of cultural fragments. Anderson has developed a humorous dreamlike world of symbolic abstraction to fight back against the ambient chaos of contemporary culture. Employing paint, cardboard, canvas, paper, rock, and even lengths of rope, his paintings, collages, assemblies, and drawings often include clippings from newspaper comics. Anderson is engaged fully in a mano a mano visual conversation the struggles with life's enigmas.

Growing up in northern Minnesota, the family home was sited near a small running creek that was replete with a populated world of river and mud creatures for playmates. Craig enjoyed the natural world to the fullest. As an adult, Anderson's lifelong daily practice besides making art is his daily walks with his dogs into the mountain wilderness surrounding his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For his formal arts education Anderson attended Hamline University in St. Paul Minnesota majoring in studio arts. The University of Colorado in Boulder granted him his MFA in painting.

Anderson's professional contributions to Santa Fe's rich cultural buffet are manifest. His first arts position in Santa Fe was teaching as professor of painting at The Institute of American Indian Art for seven years, beginning in 1989. From IAIA Anderson went to SITE Santa Fe in charge of Exhibitions Administration again for a seven year stint. From SITE, Anderson became the Director of Exhibitions Central for The Museums of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Next Anderson took on the position of Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Collections at the Museum of Miami in Miami, Florida.

Returning to Santa Fe, Anderson next became the Executive Director and Curator of Santa Fe's Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) It was at CCA that he doubled the membership in 3 short years, and kicked off Meow Wolf's much touted premier exhibition on the campus of CCA at its then warehouse facility with the installation of '"The Due Return". From CCA Anderson worked for the Cultural Art Division for the State of New Mexico as Exhibitions and Curator for central New Mexico's museums. Next came the Miami Art Museum (MAM) in Miami, Florida as Assistant Director for Collections and Exhibitions Administration.

For all this activity Anderson steadily has faithfully kept to a disciplined studio practice. His daily practice is most fundamental to Anderson's art and soul journey. In his studio he confesses that he grapples, ponders, meditates, reads, converses, visits and revisits with The Enigmas-his prime subject - dwelling in a long process that may result in many months going by before a painting, collage or assemblage or a drawing is finally finished.

Anderson often employs the application of finessed matte soft pigments, with their seductive atmospheres of dry pastel in an array of colors; powdery blues, jade greens, a pale dawn orange and or a buttercup yellow. But Anderson can ambush with his iconic stark paper white wrappings around a snowman standing against a blood red crimson background or a variously tar black background. The depiction of a snowman is a recurring theme Anderson has chosen to be witness and actor to our human follies. Skittery skinny black lines are reserved by Anderson for a skeleton's bones seemingly self involved in their mental activities at the disbelief of the aftermath of their own deaths. The skeletons are drawn bent over inspecting their bodies now stripped of flesh.

Anderson shares that his art ideas and "aha" moments when questions from an enigma can strike him while doing the dishes or performing mundane acts of daily living; these may occur as insightful musings while he works. Anderson in this show does what he has always professionally rendered to us; he has administered and exhibited art to us as a true educator. Education in its latin derivation means to lead out. Craig Anderson leads us out into his personal wilderness that is at once rejuvenating, comical, questioning, colorful and incisive.