Megan Craig painted Manhattan as no artist currently can: from a studio 91 stories up in the World Trade Center.

In the summer of 2001, the now 29-year-old cityscape painter was one of two dozen artists from around the world working in the North Tower of the World Trade Center in programs sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

“I felt a bit out of place going up in the elevators with all my equipment, surrounded by people in suits,” Craig said last Tuesday over tea in a Greenwich Village cafe. “I don’t think many people knew there were artists there.”

Craig, a graduate philosophy student as well as an artist, shared a 10,000-square-foot gutted office space with the eight other painters in the Studioscape residency and produced more than 35 paintings of the views over the East River, the West Side Highway, and the seemingly endless expanses of rooftops.

Now those views are gone, along with her paintings, destroyed on 9/11. On the morning of Sept. 11, Craig was on her way into the lobby of the North Tower when the first plane hit the building from the opposite side. She escaped unharmed, but so shaken that she didn’t paint for months afterward.

But the memory of the views remained, and Craig spent most of last year repainting the cityscapes from what she could recall. “When you paint or draw a view, there is so much you learn about it,” she said at a Brooklyn launch for the literary magazine 7 Carmine, which features her work on the cover of its latest issue. “You get to know the composition of things intimately. You could trace their outlines in your sleep.”

Craig is the most recent member of the studio residency to re-create her works, which have been exhibited in two shows in New York and New Haven last year.

Since the program’s inception in 1997, more than 140 artists have participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s studio residencies. Their work, along with re-creations by artists from the last residency programs, will be featured in a book entitled Site Matters, due out this October, according to the Council’s associate director of programs Erin Donnelly.

Many notable pieces of art were destroyed in the World Trade Center disaster. According to a National Public Radio report, the art in common areas was estimated to be worth about $10 million, including a tapestry by the Spanish surrealist Joan Miro. The financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, that occupied the North Tower’s 105th floor, owned a large collection of art that included several Rodin sculptures.

“When there’s so much loss of life, you don’t really think of the material costs,” Craig said.

In an effort to help downtown artists recover after 9/11, the New York Foundation for the Arts established the $4.6 million New York Arts Recovery Fund. Craig got a $500 grant she used to replace replace the paints, brushes, and other equipment she lost, and spent part of the summer of 2002 at an artists’ colony in Wilton, Conn. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council allowed her to finish her residency in a studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

At first, Craig didn’t think she could ever recapture what she had painted from the World Trade Center. “I had an overwhelming sense that there was a lot of work to be done,” she said.

"My hand often remembers more than my head, so part of the difficulty is to believe my hand and to work without being able to look,” she said. Instead of striving for photorealistic detail, Craig painted buildings as abstract shapes.

Craig now lives in New Haven, where she exhibited her cityscapes in December at the Mark Potter Gallery to a positive reception.

“That the towers no longer exist, and many of these views are painted, mostly from memory, I find beautiful and moving,” said 7 Carmine editor Elaine Sexton.

Craig continues to paint cityscapes from her studio on the 15th floor of a bank in downtown New Haven, at the same time working on her dissertation for her doctoral studies at New School University.

She continues to be influenced by her time at the World Trade Center. “I can’t help feeling that my eyes are etched with those lines, and now my perspective on any given day begins 91 stories up,” she said.

More examples of Craig’s work can be viewed at www.7carmine.com.