Fiona Craig Biography
Fiona Craig is an award winning, fine artist and art teacher who paints flora, landscapes, still life, and portraits. Her style is contemporary realism, in media oils, watercolours, acrylics, pastels, or mixed media. Fiona grew up in an artistic family in the Blue Mountains of Australia (west of Sydney). She participated in informal and formal academic art studies. She has held numerous solo exhibitions, taught art to adults and children, and worked by commission for several decades. Her artworks are in private and public collections worldwide having exhibited with Wentworth Galleries in Sydney for many years. Fiona enjoys travel and experiencing sights in the natural environment and botanical gardens. For the past decade, she has been living in Australia and the USA, painting, exhibiting, and teaching. While her specialty remains Australian native flora, she has also enjoyed painting American landscapes, the flora of her local botanic garden in Chicago, and a few portraits. Like many artists of the past who travelled abroad to widen their artistic horizons, Fiona also finds that the diversity of subjects provided by contrasting environments provides new interest and motivation to keep making and developing her art. Artist's Statement "My art is about beauty, or at least my perceptions of beauty, whether it be a fresh floral bloom or a weathered old tree. It may be unconventional beauty that does not conform to trends, symmetry, or the 'picturesque'. It may be the subtle kind that takes time and contemplation to appreciate. My artist's eye seeks and sees beauty everywhere. While many of my artworks look photographic, and photography is as important as my visual memory is as a reference source, I do not try to duplicate the subject in precise botanical details, or hyper- or photo-realistic technique. I render my subjects with a degree of artistic licence, with colour variations, and brush / pencil stroke decisions apparent (not blended completely smooth). This is more obvious when seeing my paintings and drawings in person rather than on the computer screen. My aim is therefore to depict beauty in both subject matter and artistic technique. Beauty brings balance and joy to my world, and I hope it does likewise for the viewer of my artworks. I am conscious of preserving a moment, expression, or season in time, as nature is ephemeral, constantly moving, changing and sometimes disappearing forever. Making art is my way of reacting passionately to what I enjoy seeing. The art-making process itself involves me in a second, closer experience of the subject I want to depict or record, constructing it from scratch on the canvas and moulding it to try to evoke my interpretation and experience of it. There is hard work and sometimes pain and frustration in the process, but there is also beauty in the 'alchemy' of mixing and applying colours and tones to a blank surface to bring up an image that makes visual sense and emotional response. The balance and joy my art brings to me is in the various processes as well as their results." You can see these contemporary floral paintings by Fiona Craig at Wentworth Galleries in Sydney.
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