Shaina Craft

Shaina Craft is a figurative artist from Philadelphia who explores portraiture and figuration through classical techniques and expressive mark-making. She creates oil paintings and charcoal drawings that transform the figure into a strong, yet fragmented subject. The idea is derived from the history of the grotesque female body - unretouched, raw, comfortable in her own imperfect skin. She believed the terms beautiful and ugly can be interchangeable. 

She uses large brushes to move powdered charcoal across the paper surface in a painterly fashion. She uses a variety of unusual tools as well as water and acetone to disrupt uniformity. Her drawings possess a certain spontaneity because she embraces the unexpected. Her work blurs the borders between the sublime and the grotesque, the emotive and the confrontational, and challenges the tropes of the figurative canon and convey the complexity of life’s experiences.