Charles Criner is the kind of artist that likes to "exhaust" the medium. He "pulls" his prints in black and white, then in color, and on top of that he sometimes adds acrylic over the print to produce original paintings on paper.

He, however, is also parsimonious, or rather, enjoys the limitations of using only three colors and no more to make his prints. He is furthermore the kind of artist / craftsman that prizes the concrete relationship between himself and his work. Criner always pulls prints himself, never letting other professional printers do this for him.

     Criner's works have strong narrative content. His images tell a story that the artist wants the viewers to comprehend easily. The story is woven out of his immediate, personal experiences - or more exactly, his recollections of those experiences in his memory - some distant and others more immediate, but in either case they are very close and familiar to the artist.

     To many viewers, however, it would appear to be the case that there are two very different groups of images: one group consists of images of fishing and the other of rural scenes that are rooted in the artist's childhood years. The fishing images depict the artist's favorite past time, which is also a popular and familiar hobby for many people.

     In contrast, the rural scenes are heroic images - in many instances imbued with a sense of religiosity - of Black People working in the fields. In recent years, a third group of images has been added to the artist's corpus. Those are the African images based upon his travel to South Africa. All three groups are represented in this exhibition.