As a student at Hillside Secondary School in West Vancouver, Craig Yeats developed an interest in watercolour painting and made many studies of the foreshore of West Vancouver.

A gallery in West Vancouver's Park Royal Mall was kind enough to display some of these works.

Yeats studied art at the Ringling School of Art And Design in Sarasota, Florida, earning the Lauren Wilford Scholarship in 1973 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting in 1974.He went on obtain a Masters of Fine Arts
degree from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro in 1977.

He painted realistically and impressionistically for many years, but came to a point where he felt that those styles were cramping the impact of his paintings.

To simplify, he began painting over his old paintings with a palette knife instead of a brush, obliterating the detail and reducing the images to basic colour and design.

Texture, colour and design became more important, and the subject less so.

Yeats' recent paintings are mostly semi-abstractions of West Vancouver landscapes, still lifes, figures and nature.

In British Columbia, his work has been displayed in galleries in Vancouver, West Vancouver, Richmond, White Rock, Kelowna, Britannia and Whistler.

Corporate collections include Bull Housser Tupper,Teck Corporation, The Insurance Institution of British Columbia, Odlum Brown and Campbell Zenk, all of Vancouver.