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Tom Craig
(1909-1969)
Tom (Thomas Theodore) Craig was born in Upland, California on June 16, 1909. Craig became a landscape, portrait and figure painter whose early career was in illustration but whose later focus was fine-art painting. He became a major figure in The California Style of watercolor painting. As a young student, Craig studied botany at the University of California at Berkeley, and living in Los Angeles, continued botanical studies at Pomona College. With a persistent interest in art, he studied briefly at Chouinard Art Institute with Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Millard Sheets and Barse Miller.
In 1928, when he was 21, he got tuberculosis, and for his health, moved for several years to Palm Springs, California for the dry desert climate. During this period, he became a serious fine-art painter, and returning to Los Angeles, studied with Frank Tolles Chamberlain and Clarence Hinkle.
Watercolor became his favorite medium, and many of his paintings were worked in a very wet style, had soft colors, and "often depicted farm or rural scenes on misty, foggy, or rainy days." (McClelland, 48) Because Northern California provided the climate conducive to this type of painting, he spent much time there, having recovered enough from the tuberculosis to be in that type of climate.
In the 1930s, he taught at Occidental College and at the University of Southern California, and in 1941, he traveled and painted throughout the Southwest on a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a WWII artist correspondent in Italy for Life magazine, and after that time, painted only occasionally as his main interest became the raising of hybrid flowers, specializing in irises.
Retiring from painting in 1950, he settled in Escondido and died in Upland on February 8, 1969.
Member: San Diego Art Guild; American Artists Congress; Penn. WC Society; SFAA; Bay Region AA.
Exhibited: LA AA, 1934 (3rd prize); Calif. Art Club, 1934-36; Calif. WC Society, 1934-46; Laguna Beach AA, 1936 (1st prize); Oakland Art Gallery, 1937; SFAA, 1936-37; CPLH, 1937 (solo); CGA, 1937; Santa Cruz Art League, 1938; GGIE, 1939; LA County Fair, 1940; Womans Club (Beverly Hills), 1941; De Young Museum, 1943 (self portrait); Chaffey AA (LA), 1947; Mt Washington Arts Festival (LA), 1951.
Works Held: Chaffey Communities Cultural Center (Upland); LACMA; Santa Barbara Museum; Seattle Museum; Pomona College; AIC; CPLH.
Source:
Gordon T. McClelland & Jay T. Last, The California Style, p. 48, Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
WWAA 1936-41; WWC 1942; WWPC 1951.
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