Artist Jason Craighead Receives "Standing Ovation" from Raleigh Metro Magazine's Readers

Raleigh, NC, July 12, 2008 --(PR.com)-- Raleigh Metro Magazine has announced that Jason Craighead of Raleigh has been named the top artist from the Triangle area to the coast in its annual Metro Bravo Readers Poll.

This year’s “Standing Ovation” award marks the fourth consecutive win for the abstract artist in Metro, a monthly magazine covering a 22-county region. The Metro Bravo awards showcase readers’ favorites in a wide variety of categories.

Craighead’s work was most recently featured in a two-person exhibit at the Miriam Preston Block Art Gallery in the Municipal Building in downtown Raleigh. Entitled “Microcosm/Macrocosm,” his large canvases were displayed with artist Tricia McKellar’s smaller pieces. The City of Raleigh subsequently purchased the largest of Craighead’s paintings in the show. It is now on display in One Exchange Plaza on Fayetteville Street.

Metro’s own art critic, artist Louis St. Lewis, has said of Craighead’s work, ““If you have never seen [Jason’s] paintings before, they have the definite vibe of abstract expressionism, and they conjure up ghosts of everyone from Motherwell to Franz Kline to Cy Twombly.”

Joseph Rowan, owner of Somerhill Gallery in Durham and a patriarch in the Triangle arts community, notes, “"I am struck by Jason’s ways of simplifying or magnifying a thought or an experience into comprehensible, imaginable form. With line, emerging forms, and juicy painterly passages on canvas, Jason does what a gifted artist is supposed to make us do. And that is to stop us to better ponder what we might not otherwise.”

Craighead is an active member of the arts community and is now working with the Raleigh Arts Commission on its plans for future public art. He has also donated paintings for numerous charitable causes, including Works of Heart, the Triangle area’s annual premiere art auction to benefit The Alliance of AIDS Services – Carolina.

Jason Craighead is currently represented by Somerhill Gallery in Durham, Broadhurst Gallery in Pinehurst, Anne Irwin Fine Art in Atlanta, GA,, and Bucks Gallery of Fine Art in Newtown, PA.

The first half of the Metro Bravo awards appear in this month’s edition of Raleigh Metro Magazine, which is available on newsstands and on line at www.metronc.com.

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