Things that are Really Important
By Sebouh Gemdjian of the Highland Park Mirror
One can say that the Raritan runs through Robert Craig's veins. He is a Piscataway native printmaker who frequently exhibits at Beamesderfer Gallery in Highland Park, where he had an opening on Sunday, September 16. Looking at his wood and linoleum cuts, one can tell that he has presented us with what he considers to be really important, like memories contained in a sentence that starts with "Remember when..." A veteran paratrooper who re-volunteered during the Gulf War, today Craig listens to the river for essence. Here is the essence of a sunset, and here is the essence of a landscape, he seems to say, now you fill in the memory that made you cry. And here is the war.
"A generation of people who didn't serve their country went by and they are laying judgment on young people who are better targets for a kiss than they are for a bullet," Craig said of the emotions behind a group of war-themed prints. At first glance they may appear very different from his landscapes and still life, more like caricatures, but the approach is the same. We are given strokes - a sketch of George Bush, text that reads "blah, blah, blah," a skeleton in uniform...a vague figure of a dictator, a caption of "Generalissimo Whatshisname" - and we get to fill in the emotions.
"They're young. Some of them will never see the things that we love in life, the things that are really important," he adds compassionately. The rest of the exhibition, the sunsets and figures and landscapes that have nothing to do with the war, seem to be especially meant for the soldiers that came back.
"It's easy to get inspiration from what's happened in the last five years," Craig says about what makes him tick. "The other work, I just try to move my hands. I just try to keep busy. It could be from the tiniest of things, it could be from other artists as well. It could be as simple as a still life, it could be as complex as politics."
Perhaps that is what art is - a tiny thing on our way through life that we realize, all too late, that we shouldn't have missed. Craig grew up in Piscataway, with Rutgers in his back yard. He is self taught, despite the fact that he went to Rutgers to study art and did very well, but had to withdraw after a year because of the financial strain of a divorce.
Art, however, seems to be a means to achieving a life mission to Craig, to point us in the right direction, towards our expressions and our delusions, and the beauty that we seem to try to ignore. To him, art is beyond mere work, and this leads him to the honesty his works radiate.
There is no spoon-feeding with Craig. He is a reporter of all the perspectives of reality, including the process itself. He says: "I see my work slightly as abstract. It's not real, the black and white work especially. There is white, there is black and there is gray, and you have to say what you have to say with those three things. It's something slightly less than reality."
Sometimes he adds a couple of shades to the ink in his prints. As featured on the invitation to his opening, red background and yellow leaves accentuate a black trunk. "Red Morning," a wood cut with a silhouette of a tree in the foreground, triggers us with another moment we didn't miss - but might have forgotten.
"I come home after my job and I go to the studio and I work," says Craig of his lifestyle. "I can't afford to live off my art, a lot of artists can't. So we have to work. You take whatever time is given, you use it and you work." Perhaps this is what is really important.
Bob Craig's relief prints are magically, environmentally moving
By Geoff Gehman Of The Morning Call
Connexions is presenting a terrific exhibition of relief prints by Bob Craig, an Eastonian who finds beauty in an overgrown mill, community in a lonely bend in the road and relief in swirling sculptural pictures he compares to ''pen and ink on steroids.''
A native of Piscataway, N.J., Craig began turning art into a career in his 30s, after leaving the Army. He took up relief printing after being wowed by an exhibition of woodblocks by Albrecht Durer, an exquisite dramatist of emotional grays. Slightly colorblind, he works mostly in black and white. Committed to preserving local farms before they become McMansionvilles, he's just as devoted to making the past cling as tenaciously as a vine.
Craig specializes in a kind of giddy, spooky magic realism. All his anchors — buildings, trees, roads — are impressively shaped and spaced, graspable and breathable. Yet they seem slightly surreal surrounded by mercurial, unpredictable elements. Vibrating bands of light make silos spin like old phonograph cylinders. Intricately incised totem-pole patterns give tree bark both bite and bark.
Other linocutters weaken their contrast with soppy, amorphous whites. Craig's whites are nicely shaved and splintered. They not only sharpen form, they sharpen meaning.
All the planets align in ''Staring at the Sun,'' a 15-by-24-inch linocut of a water tower and power station illuminated — or powered — by a refiner's fire of gold. The whirlpooling, towering sky transforms the tower into a giant rocket and the entire scene into a natural fireworks show.
At 47 Craig still has a kid's view of the sky as a menagerie of fantasy characters. In ''Along the Old Post,'' a linocut, a farm seems protected by a waving wall of hay, hail and other illusions. In ''Last Legs,'' another linocut, a billowing tidal wave of clouds threatens to level a slightly ramshackle Victorian house.
Craig generally loses power when he heaps on color. The woodcut ''Sleeping Delaware'' is a mere tropical cartoon; in ''Grasslands,'' heavy greens nearly break the boughs. When he sticks with black and white, or slips in some gray-blue, he neatly illustrates his neat observation that ''except for our bodies the land is the surest benchmark for measuring the past to the present.''
''The Printed Landscape,'' works by Bob Craig, through July 31, Connexions, 213 Northampton St., Easton. Hours: noon-4 p.m. Sunday-Monday, noon-5 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday. 610-250-7627, http://www.connexionsgallery.com.