Unlocking Unorthodoxy

At age 79, Craig Tennant is conscientiously reinventing his career to shy away from tired formulas and to create art that makes him happy. The creative change hearkens back to his roots in advertising while it also gives him more permission to experiment and to paint what he wants.

“I’m coming back to who I really am, and that’s a graphic artist,” he says. “I’m going to go into more design and a flatter look.”

The directional change, Tennant says, is due in part to being burned out on creative ideas after feeling compelled to produce the same painting time and time again. “You actually paint yourself into a corner; you can’t experiment anymore,” he says.

Tennant has also been frustrated by the time and effort necessary to make Western paintings historically accurate and to coax an idea out of his head and into reality. In the past, he worked with historians to ensure that his ideas were accurate and used models and “pages of preconceived ideas” to push them to re-enact the images already in his head.

Read the full article in the January/February 2026 issue.