About Megan Craver
Paintings currently on display at the Paragon Art Gallery, 132 Elk Avenue Crested Butte, Co. Check out her new work on Instagram @ colorado_art_craver and purchase on Etsy at coloradoartcraver.
Bio:
A professional painter, private instructor, muralist and art enthusiast. Megan Craver has been a freelance artist for over 12 years. Based out of Crested Butte Colorado a small mountain town deep in the Rockies. She is a member of the Paragon Art Gallery in Crested Butte Colorado and recently painted a Mountain Express bus for the town of Crested Butte.
Megan has been a painting instructor with the Center for the Arts Crested Butte for four years. She holds a degree in Fine Art in Painting with a minor in Art History. Her education began while studying under the classical master Myron Barnstone, from whom she learned the Golden Section method of composition, which is based around Sacred Geometry, as well as Fletcher Color Theory in relation to painting. Throughout her art education Megan took many classes in anatomy, which bolstered her understanding of the human figure. Once in college she studied abroad in Rome, Italy for an entire year and in this time had a solo showing of her paintings in Barcelona, Spain as well as several group shows in Rome, Italy. Megan Craver has participated in many solo and group shows since and continues to practice her art in Crested Butte, Colorado.
Artist Statement from Storm Series
In the Gunnison Valley of Colorado our lives revolve around storms. In the summer there is an intense monsoon season. Big thunderheads roll in and powerful lightning and thunderstorms ensue, giving continual life to the flora. In the winter we pray for snow. It often comes in storm cycles that can last for weeks and our little valley gets socked in. When that snow melts o ff in the spring it gives life to the wild flowers and drinking water to us. My storm series depicts this energy and growth as a continual beautiful cycle. These paintings are all inspired by my viewpoint of the West Elk Mountains and surrounding ranges. I abstract them with radiating lines and curves to express the vigor and movement of the storms as they actually occurred. This series has turned into beautiful record of my experiences.
Artist Statement from Garden Series
As humans we have allowed ourselves to become removed from the things that connect us with our planet. We have traded farming, hunting, and sleeping under the stars for grocery stores and concrete jungles. Yet despite grounding ourselves in the monotony of material objects, there is wanderlust inside all of us. When we try to reconnect with our roots, in even the smallest of ways we help fulfill this desire.
In my own life I have found a link to the past through gardening and agriculture. This bond became deeper when I started expressing these concepts in my paintings and drawings. Over the last few years I began teaching art and experiencing another connection with the past, in the passing down of knowledge to the next generation through rhetoric.
My recent artwork describes the human presence in landscape in a series called Split Agriculture. Living even here in the vast Gunnison Valley, you seldom find a place where there is no trace of mankind’s impact. Whether represented as a gardener or a farmer interacting with and manipulating the earth, or as a suggested presence such as hay bales, roads, and decaying fence lines. Mankind’s influence in nature is everywhere. While my paintings are landscapes they are meant to represent movement and the energy of my surroundings rather then being a photo realistic version of the land. I embody this energy through sweeping brush strokes and color layers. It is important to me that the final image of my painting speaks about the process.
Art is a reflection of our personal experiences. I believe this to be true of all art regardless of its abstract or defined nature. My own work is certainly a manifestation of this concept. Throughout the years I have dabbled in classical art practices and abstraction. I believe experimenting in this way helped give my hand the voice to create the imagery of my mind. No matter the subject matter of the series, my artwork represents my life, my story, my memories and sometimes dreams of things to come.
Artist Statement from Split Agriculture
In this show I explore ideas inspired by the Gunnison Valley’s short growing seasons and barren winters using knowledge gained from my own experiences with agriculture, horticulture and permaculture in the valley. Over the past three summers, I have been gardening and working with different groups or individually to produce food. With only a hundred and thirty odd days between frosts this limited time of growth has become very important to me.
While these paintings are landscapes, they are intended more as a representation of movement than a direct depiction of land. Painting is a process and an illusion; it is a language of mark making. By painting on the front and backs of these plexi glass panels’, layers of color are revealed in the final piece. On the canvases there are brush strokes left behind from mistakes being wiped away. These marks leave behind the memories of paint.
The human presence is prevalent in my work because it is ingrained in our daily landscape, whether as a gardener or a farmer interacting with the earth, or as a suggested presence such as hay bales, roads, telephone poles, or a decaying fence. I represent the figure realistically and figuratively. Living in this valley, you seldom find a place where there is no trace of mankind’s impact.
Can a painting be considered a landscape if it represents human form? We live in a world where man is present and interacts with all things, including the natural landscape.
Photo from Megan Craver's show Disappearing Domain at Malverda, Barcelona, Spain