As a young student, Craig studied botany at the University of California at Berkeley, and living in Los Angeles, continued botanical studies at Pomona College.  With a persistent interest in art, he studied briefly at Chouinard Art Institute with Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Millard Sheets and Barse Miller.

In 1928, when he was 21, he got tuberculosis, and for his health, moved for several years to Palm Springs, California for the dry desert climate.  During this period, he became a serious fine-art painter, and returning to Los Angeles, studied with Frank Tolles Chamberlain and Clarence Hinkle. 

Watercolor became his favorite medium, and many of his paintings were worked in a very wet style, had soft colors, and "often depicted farm or rural scenes on misty, foggy, or rainy days." (McClelland, 48)  Because Northern California provided the climate conducive to this type of painting, he spent much time there, having recovered enough from the tuberculosis to be in that type of climate.

In the 1930s, he taught at Occidental College and at the University of Southern California, and in 1941, he traveled and painted throughout the Southwest on a Guggenheim Fellowship.  He was a World War II artist correspondent in Italy for Life magazine, and after that time, painted only occasionally as his main interest became the raising of hybrid flowers, specializing in irises.  In 1950, he settled in Escondido.

Sources:
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940
Gordon T. McClelland & Jay T. Last, The California Style, p. 48

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