Artist Exhibit: Annie Shaver-Crandell, Views of Town and Country

Huntington Public Library / Main Art Gallery, Add338 Main Street, Huntington, NY  11743; 631-427-5165

March 1-April 26, 2015; Artist Reception: Saturday, March 7; 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, Hours: Mon-Fri  9 am – 9 pm; Sat 10 am – 6 pm; Sun 1 pm – 6 pm

Ms Shaver-Crandell is known for her exciting and varied palettes. The artist’s color sense dominates the paintings and drawings in this exhibition, evoking the purples and corals of a winter sunset over water towers in Manhattan, the deep greens of a yew hedge at Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay, a glorious pink dogwood on the Old Westbury SUNY campus, and lavender fields in Provence and the North Fork, the somber browns of a cut field in autumn. She likes to work out of doors when weather permits, chasing available light and temperatures to capture moods and places.

Depending on her subject, location and the season, Annie Shaver-Crandell works in oil, watercolor, acrylic, pastel and monotype, a technique that yields at most two prints.  All are represented in this exhibition. She has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions and is found in art collections globally.

Though many of the works in the show are primarily landscapes and city views, some of which represent endangered or now-vanished sites, the artist’s lifelong affection for horses has also played an important part in her choice of subjects for this show. A longtime Manhattan resident, she is currently championing the cause of preservation in Central Park of the carriage horses and drivers so appealing to tourists and New Yorkers alike. Now a part-time Long Islander too, she takes great pleasure in documenting some of the outings of the Smithtown Hunt.  Other horses portrayed in this exhibition are wild ponies living on Chincoteague Island in Virginia, Icelandic ponies on a Vermont farm, and white cattle-herding horses of the Camargue in southern France.

Annie Shaver-Crandell exhibits regularly at the Salmagundi Club of New York, where she chairs the Program Committee and also serves on the Board of Directors.  In addition to several books on medieval European art and numerous articles in other fields of art history, she is the author of Annie Shaver-Crandell: A Collection of Views: Landscapes, Cityscapes and Interiors, New York, 2014, available through her website, www.annieshavercrandell.com.