Craig Albright: Chasing Light

Craig Albright was born in Sioux City, Iowa, he graduated from Sioux City North High School, and currently lives with his family in Iowa City. As a young man, he spent evenings and long summer days working at a mill outside Sergeant Bluff, where he sawed huge cotton wood logs and building pallets. He developed a deep appreciation for, and has been inspired by, the pastoral and industrial landscapes of our state. The dynamics of the weather and shifting light, in particular, have always held great influence on his work. “Sundown in rural Iowa is a transcendent experience that often reveals the true subject of my paintings. It is that ‘magic hour,’ when the colors of the sky and ground lose their stark contrasts and slowly merge together in muted intensity that I feel the land the most.”

Chasing Light, Albright’s first one-person museum exhibition, includes new and recent landscape paintings that he sees as both poetic and spiritual. He uses a combination of memory and photographic references in his work. “My interest is not to capture a faithful copy of what I see or to duplicate a photograph. I’m taking cues from various sources. Through the activity of painting, I use a process of abstracting, distilling, refining and even obliterating the image before me to bring the painting to its own life.”

Albright is a painter whose work ranges between abstraction and realism; he’s interested in what is felt as well as what is seen, “There is a nearly audible hum as the evening air descends on the fields. Deep greens and blues vibrate and shimmer against the glowing tones of the sunset. It is this harmony, this vibration, this transience, that I strive to share in my paintings.” Albright follows in the footsteps of other modern artists, such as Richard Diebenkorn, Gerhard Richter, and American Tonalist painters, who were interested in atmospheric subtleties, vision and sensuality, light and dark.

Craig Albright received a BFA in Drawing at the University of Iowa in 1991, and an MFA in Painting from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1997. He has taught painting and drawing at Indiana University and DePauw University. His works are in the permanent collection of the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa and the Iowa City Public Library.