Craig Mooney

Craig Mooney’s first art teacher was the streets of New York City where in his childhood he would spend afternoons with his father (himself an artist) learning how to make art with what could be found around them. His father, an amateur artist, taught him how to create oil paintings from discarded art supplies found on city streets. To Mooney, the city was an endless source of inspiration at an early age. Though Mooney would later go on to study art formally, he often cites these early artistic endeavors as the truest artistic training he ever received. After a brief career in the film industry Mooney left New York for the quiet isolation of Vermont where he can utilize the natural world as a source of inspiration for his art.

Mooney’s paintings feature dramatic moments and engage with emotions in an expansive and expressive way. His brushstrokes are free and varied and his palette dreamy and saturated. He works primarily with figurative subjects but incorporates abstract technique, creating a dreamlike, almost cinematic, world of soft angles and bright colors. He describes his work as symbolic rather than specific - capturing the idea of a place or a moment rather than a true representation of the place itself.

Craig Mooney makes paintings of dramatic moments and heightened emotionality that are known for being expansive and expressive. Though a representational painter, the artist incorporates a myriad of abstract qualities throughout his paintings. In his figurative work, Mooney romanticizes his subjects and presents them in an atmospheric lens that is best described as dreamlike. His paintings appear to be capturing a moment suspended in time. While his work feels familiar, it is not specific. Rather it is, on a very basic level, symbolism of what could have been, has been or will be...

After a brief career in the film industry, the artist moved out of New York in the mid-nineties to rural Vermont. The open and bucolic settings of the countryside allowed Mooney new sources of inspiration.

Today, Mooney devotes himself full time to his art at his studio in Vermont.