Craig Alan

Narrative: Dress “Matter of Course”

Mixed media. Feathers in shadow box, painted with acrylic on top surface of the plexi glass.

Contemporary portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. Miniature paintings in composition.

Contemporary portrait of Elizabeth Taylor.

The popular and innovative American Neo-Pop artist Craig Alan was born in San Bernardino, California, in 1971. Although Alan was inclined to creativity and the visual arts from an early age, it was not until his family moved to New Orleans, where he truly developed a sense of artistic purpose in earnest. Alan’s first concentrated attempts at visual expression were through street portraiture, which provided him with the experience and means to purchase art supplies and further his informal artistic studies. Craig Alan attended the University of Mobile in Alabama, where he pursed a degree in the visual arts. During his time at the university, Alan garnered academic recognition and earned awards for excellence in studio art practice. He participated in Art with a Southern Drawl, one of the university’s most popular art exhibitions, which featured forty-two of Alan’s artworks. The artist’s specialty has been and is predominantly figurative works, with Alan seeking new and innovative modes or re-working historical modes of figural representation. He has experimented with and incorporated elements of make-up/cosmetic artistry, set design, sculpture, and traditional figure drawing in his oeuvre. And his shadowbox series, which combines seemingly contrasting and contradictory elements—dresses made of ribbons and feather; shells made of pierced-paper and sticks—and transcends the traditional two-dimensional art form. Craig Alan has received his greatest popular acclaim from collectors for his POPULUS series. Through an intricate process of deconstruction and construction, Alan re-creates iconic images of popular figures through the working and reworking of hundreds of miniature, individuated figures viewed from an aerial or birds-eye-view. His images of celebrities, heroes, or recognizable sites, such as the U.S. Capitol or Statue of Liberty, invite close, slow viewing and scrutiny, that ultimately reveals greater thematic associations and allusions through finely rendered hand details. Craig Alan’s variety of series of art-making—Populus, Narrative, and Motivo—reveals, through different modes of expression, the artist’s knowledge of and proficiency with the art historical figurative...