Craig's career belongs to the contemporary American current that has continued to take the European postwar tradition of textured, materially complex abstract painting, the informel and matter-painting traditions of Tàpies, Dubuffet, Burri, and their peers, as a working basis for new American studio practice, and his New Mexico-based version of that tradition is grounded in the particular landscape, light, and natural materials of the Southwest.
Craig came to art through an unusual practical apprenticeship. The post-high-school period he spent in a stained glass studio gave him an early, hands-on familiarity with the disciplines of design, color, and the construction of layered translucent surfaces, and the head artist's recognition of his drawing ability set the direction of his subsequent formal training.
His art-school training combined painting and sculpture in a way that would underlie his subsequent practice. The early encounter with Tàpies's heavily textured, often surface-and-relief paintings provided the immediate technical inspiration: the recognition that a painting could be a layered, built-up, almost geological object rather than a strictly two-dimensional pictorial field. The parallel encounter with Kandinsky's writings and paintings provided the conceptual scaffolding, the conviction that abstract painting could carry serious spiritual and emotional weight rather than functioning only as formal exercise.
His mature work has settled into a recognizable studio practice. Working in mixed media on panel and canvas, he builds up dense, layered surfaces that combine carefully considered geometric structure with more open gestural mark-making, and the pigments, enamels, varnishes, and marble dust he uses contribute to the heavy textural quality of the finished pieces. The compositions are landscape-based without being explicitly representational, drawing on the colors, patterns, and atmospheric weather of the natural world for their structural and emotional material.
The Albuquerque studio in which most of this work is produced sits within the broader New Mexican landscape and art community, and his exhibition record has run through galleries in Santa Fe and across the broader Southwest. His position today is that of a working contemporary American abstract painter whose practice belongs to the long tradition of European-influenced, materially complex postwar abstraction as carried forward into the contemporary American art world.