Terry Craig is a contemporary American abstract painter whose densely layered, textured landscape-based compositions, built from enamels, varnishes, marble dust, and powdered pigment, extend the European modernist traditions of Kandinsky and Antoni Tàpies into a distinctive contemporary vocabulary rooted in the colours and patterns of the natural world.
Terry Craig is an American contemporary painter based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, working in a landscape-derived abstract idiom. He came to art through an apprenticeship in a stained glass studio after high school, where the head artist recognized his drawing ability and encouraged him to pursue formal training at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida. He studied painting and sculpture there and emerged with a working interest in the heavily textured surface and material density of the European postwar abstractionists.
His mature work is characterized by densely layered, mixed-media compositions that incorporate enamels, varnishes, marble dust, powdered pigment, and other materials into a single textured surface. The paintings register a sustained tension between geometric order and gestural mark, and his subjects are drawn from the colors and patterns of the natural world, landscape, weather, geology, translated into abstraction. His acknowledged reference points are Wassily Kandinsky, whose theoretical commitment to abstraction as a vehicle for spiritual expression provides the philosophical framework, and Antoni Tàpies, whose heavily worked, materially complex postwar Catalan abstractions provided the immediate technical model.