■ ‘Da Group’ member’s paintings featured at downtown gallery

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Some of Craig Britton’s oil paintings now on display at Benicia Plein Air Gallery are so new, the paint is still drying.

Britton, a Crockett artist, is featured at the gallery this month. He selected the works for display from a group that represents the creative growth he has made over the last two years, in technique and in attitude.

And since that growth continues, he said, some very new paintings had to be included.

“The focus of the work is a combination of making explorations into evolving my technique in painting to being freer and more expressive, as opposed to literal and descriptive,” he said.

“What is driving that is more about the emotion of what interests me in the subject matter, rather than the visual content. It’s got to be both. It’s finally revealing that I get to expose my emotions in what I’m painting in the narrative, and maybe feeling more free to do that. I’ve learned a lot in the last two years, how to handle paint, how to be less literal and more direct, whether in implied narrative or lighting.

“I think I’ve learned a lot about tonality and lighting in the last two years. It seems like it popped out of nowhere, but it was a long time coming.”

Britton, a Chicago native who moved to Crockett from San Francisco in 2005, said he didn’t have one big “a-ha!” moment, but a series of small epiphanies — not the kind that take the breath away, but the kind that require a pause to understand how it happened. And to figure out how to do it again.

“Can I repeat that? Do I understand how I got there?” he said. “Being able to understand how you got there and understand the process and the path — being able to retrace the crumbs, that’s a revelation.”

Part of Britton’s focus over the last two years, he said, has been “consciously working how to get more involved, how to get better at lighting and atmospherics and better at implied narrative and make it less obvious,” he said. “None of the steps or the pieces are bigger than the other. It’s adding them together, one little increment at a time.”

Most of his paintings are of scenes from around the San Francisco Bay Area. But the subject matter, “especially the last couple years, they’re springboards. I care less and less about what it is of, I care a lot more about what it’s about. What it’s about is, to me, whatever my emotional connection to the place is, or something associated with the place — or I’m trying to express something else that I’m feeling, and I’m using this as a vehicle to get there.”

In his evolution as a painter, Britton called a painting of two women standing near the Benicia waterfront on First Street “a breakthrough. It was painted more quickly. I was more concerned about the form and the lighting than strictly getting the lines perfect,” he said.

“It was that the forms were right and the lighting was working as far as creating the dimensionality and a sense of atmosphere.”

After his current show, Britton wants to create that atmosphere on a larger scale. He wants to go big.

“I love to paint big, and I find it difficult to paint small,” he said. “I can’t wait to make a couple of new paintings that are at least three by four feet, preferably bigger.

“I am excited to apply the things I’ve been learning and discovering to bigger canvases. I can’t wait, because I know it’s going to be exciting to do that,” he said. “I just can’t wait.”

If You Go
Craig Britton’s paintings are at the Benicia Plein Air Gallery, 307 First St., for the rest of November. An artist’s reception is Saturday from 5-7 p.m.