Book Description

This extensively illustrated volume collects the varied, powerful work of Meinrad Craighead, an artist whose images find their beginnings in her Catholic roots (she was a nun for fourteen years) as well as in the traditions of Southwest Native American Culture, in which she has immersed herself since moving to New Mexico twenty years ago.Craighead has devoted her life to contemplation, prayer, and art. Her images are both figurative and abstract; she works in both black-and-white and color. Animals figure prominently in her work, as do dream figures and the artist herself in various manifestations. Oftentimes her images relate journeys she has taken, either on this earth or in waking or sleeping dreams. Many times, her paintings are accompanied by her own telling of these stories, and as a writer, Craighead has the ability to move us as deeply as her images do.This retrospective conveys Craighead's enormous body of work over the past forty years. It is a tribute to an important visionary, a fine artist, and an inspiring life. Essays by Rosemary Davies, a writer who first met Craighead at Stanbrook Abbey; Virginia Beane Rutter, a Jungian analyst and the author of Embracing Persephone and Celebrating Girls; and Eugenia Parry, an art historian and the author of numerous books and essays about art and photography, discuss Meinrad Craighead's work with subtlety and insight.