Last Light

Craig Mooney (born 1969) is an American painter known for large-scale, emotionally charged work that blends recognizable subjects with abstraction and atmosphere. Raised in midtown Manhattan, he learned to paint early through his father, an amateur artist who taught him to work with oil paint using whatever materials were available. Mooney later completed degrees at Wheaton College (B.A., 1992) and Columbia University’s School of General Studies (1994), building a foundation that supports both his draftsmanship and his interest in narrative image-making.

After a brief career in the film industry, Mooney moved in the mid-1990s to rural Vermont, where the slower pace and open landscape redirected his attention toward mood, light, and memory rather than literal documentation. While his paintings are representational at their core, he often pushes the scene into something less specific, using blurred fields, shifting edges, and heightened light to create a suspended, dreamlike moment. Mooney maintains an active exhibition schedule and is represented and exhibited through multiple galleries listed on his studio site, with work spanning figures, landscapes, the sea, and city imagery.