Episode 86-Craig Hood

Artists of New England

Craig Hood lives and works in Eliot, ME (formerly based in Portsmouth, NH). He is a Professor Emeritus of Studio Art at the University of New Hampshire where he taught painting and drawing from 1981-2018. He has an extensive exhibition record nationally (also in Japan and Canada) and has won a Ford Foundation Grant, been a finalist for the Rome Prize in Painting (1987), and nominated for a Louis Comfort-Tiffany Award (1999). He has been associated with galleries in Washington, D.C. (Jane Haslem), Montreal, QC (Beaux-arts des Amériques), Portland, ME (Greenhut Galleries), Indianapolis, IN (Mark Ruschman), and Naples, FL (Trudy Labell Fine Art). He has been included in group exhibitions at the Bowery Gallery, the First Street Gallery, the National Academy of Design, and the New York Studio School. Since the early 1990s Craig Hood has focused primarily on figure-in-landscape images. In 2006 one of these, Man Coming or Going, was included in a comprehensive examination of the human figure in American art at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, The Figure in American Painting and Drawing, 1985-2005. Since 2015 he has also been active as a plein air landscape painter (Van Ward Gallery in Ogunquit, ME and the George Marshall Store Gallery in York, ME, in addition to others). In addition to his work at the University of New Hampshire, Craig Hood has also taught English at Kobe University in Kobe, Japan (1996-7) and painting and drawing in Ascoli Piceno, Italy (UNH in Italy Program, fall semester, 2002). In 2011 he had the first of three solo exhibitions at Beaux-arts des Amériques in Montreal, QC, Blue River (followed by Semi-Precious Things, a show of still life drawings, in 2014 and Wherever in the World, figure-in-landscape works, in 2017). In 2015 he was named as a Falk Visiting Artist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where his work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Weatherspoon Museum.