Craig Magoon

After a decades long career as a commercial artist in the gift and greeting card industries, I now mainly concentrate on my painting, mostly detailed renderings of landscapes and the creatures that inhabit our wild places. Hiking and photographing the outdoors here in Northern California and other parts of the United States naturally led me to painting what I saw. Living in the redwoods not far from the ocean provides an endless source of inspiration and subject matter.

I mostly paint scenes of places I traveled and I’ve always been drawn to the wilderness and hard-to-get-to places. I try to capture a ‘moment in time’ and paint it as it happened without too much embellishment, although I have no problem adding and editing as necessary. Nature usually composes the painting but at a certain point art takes over.

Mostly self taught, I’ve worked with oils and watercolors but mostly I paint in acrylic on gessobord and canvas as it works with my preferred subject matter, these days landscapes. I still have an occasional tug towards watercolors and pencil sketches.