URBAN PAINTER SEEKS NEW HORIZONS

Ms. Craig, 27, was a member of the World Trade Center studio artist internship program, and spent the spring and summer of 2001 on the 91st floor of the towers with a select group of painters chosen for their skill and talent. The program was founded in the 1990s, using vacant space in the towers to allow artists to experience the city from high above the ground.
That internship came to a screeching halt Sept. 11, when two planes piloted by terrorists slammed into the twin towers of the trade center, destroying not only the buildings, but also thousands of lives. Ms. Craig escaped unharmed from the building-she was entering the lobby and heading to her studio at the time-but the impact of the terrorist attack on her beloved city still lingers. She lost her studio, all her supplies, and was forced to start over and build a new collection of paintings of the city.
Since then, Ms. Craig has settled in Bethany, where she has a new studio. She is also an art and philosophy teacher at the schools affiliated with the New School University in New York City, and spends periodic weekends visiting her parents, Peter and Susan Craig, in Goshen.
"What was hardest was starting over, after spending so much time painting the city from the studio, because I had no supplies," Ms. Craig said, during a recent interview from New York City. "I've been working on recreating some of the things I did from that time period, using photographs and just plain memory from the building. I think I'm approaching the end of that cycle. It's evolving into other things."
Ms. Craig attended Wamogo Regional High School in Bantam and then the Taft School in Watertown during her junior and senior year. After graduation, the young artist attended Yale University in New Haven, majoring in philosophy and minoring in art. She is currently completing her Ph.D. thesis in philosophy, is working as a teacher and is painting her landscapes in the city and, most recently, on the dunes in Provincetown, Mass.
It was while attending classes at Taft that the artist started painting.
"I had a wonderful art teacher named Mark Potter, and I started using oils at that point," she said. "At Yale, I had terrific teachers and there's a really wonderful art program there, so my art sort of solidified there.
"I moved to New York City and worked in an art gallery, and got involved in a lot of different projects," she continued. "That's when I started painting cityscapes. I had no studio so I painted in my living room, looking out the window at the view of the city. It was so easy and accessible to have everything right there."
Using her training as a philosophy student, Ms. Craig teaches art philosophy to students at Eugene Lang College and Parsons University, helping them discover their own views and opinions about classic and contemporary forms of art. Her own style of painting could be categorized as abstract, but like many painters, the artist doesn't like to lock herself into any one genre.
"I think my paintings are a reflection of the city itself," she said. "I paint almost exclusively from observation and I'm mostly interested in composition and color. I like abstraction, but I don't go that way-I try to be really true to what I'm doing. I'm aware that my work is sort of geometric, and I use a lot of blocky, chunky structures, which are everywhere in New York City. I paint to depict those buildings in a concise, true way."
This past April, Ms. Craig organized a philosophy and art conference at the New School, titled "Thinking Through Sept. 11-New York Philosophers Respond." The conference was a gathering of thinkers and artists from the university and the city, and included gallery shows, written and verbal presentations about the impact of the attack on creativity and "just a general way for people to respond," Ms. Craig said.
"The conference was very separate from the art world," she added. "Basically, it was put together by a committee of graduate students at the New School, but it was sort of my brainchild. I was very attached to it, because I felt that there wasn't a lot of discussion going on out there and I needed to start a forum to help people start talking about it. It was very successful."
The artist's own paintings of the city, painted from memory after her four months on the 91st floor, depict the Brooklyn Bridge, views from the window to the ground including the outdoor park and fountain, night scenes of building windows filled with light, and traffic scenes. Her colors are muted in some images, bright and full of life in others. Since her visit to Massachusetts, Ms. Craig is trying to expand her focus to allow herself to paint more open spaces, such as rural landscapes and beach scenes. She is also looking ahead at her career as an artist and teacher.
"I'd love to keep teaching, but not in a full time kind of way," she said. "I enjoy writing and I hope to eventually publish some work, but also keep painting full time, write about it and share my ideas about painting and art."
The rural towns of Bethany and Goshen offer Ms. Craig even more opportunities to expand her ability as an artist.
"I like the cityscape type of painting, especially in New York City, because it's' the kind of place where you can make it beautiful if you see the wonderful things there," she said. "At first, painting in a rural setting was really hard. You have to change the way you think. When you do a cityscape, you make it your own. Finding that with other landscapes won't be as easy. It's going to take a new [way of thinking] to figure it out. But I'm very open to the idea."