Adventure of the Unknown

Grant Drumheller

April 17 - June 14, 2025
Artist Talk: Thurs., May 22, 6pm

About the Show

These works are from a recent group of paintings where I have differentiated the manner and method of painting from earlier works. Having been at this for a longtime, I realized there were moments where the painting could go in any number of directions, and I felt determined to allow the formation to declare itself organically, to the greatest degree possible.

Often the work would begin and stay in the most non-objective terms — large gestures and marks of strong colors — only to remain that way for months and sometimes years, awaiting a direction to declare itself, or for me to act. It wasn’t a matter of me simply deciding what the subject of any given painting would be — it was a matter of my waiting for painting’s intrinsic “thing” to reveal itself to me.

This might sound absurd, but it seemed more real to me, more authentic to find a subject in the cloud of strokes and colors than impose one from outside. And so it was, as I began breaking down the painted strokes and colors, a repertory of characters and places emerged… My rear garden, my family, the park and trees in Brooklyn that I often go to, street dancers, my dog and others, a density of lichen-frosted pines on a walk in Deer Isle. Often the issue arose on the same picture as images emerged; a face here, a bit of foliage there, how would they meet or wed as a continuous fabric?

And that adventure of the unknown is a blessed place I now covet. Each time I ask myself, “How can I get there again?” to that place where I do not lead the work but it instead leads me. I now inhabit a space of great freedom. To embrace the unknown in my work is the wonderful result of having painted all these years.

— Grant Drumheller

Featured Artist

Featured

Grant Drumheller

In the artist’s own words, “The act of painting is really a way to draw with color. No matter how complicated the idea or powerful the unconscious obsession behind the work, all of it is ultimately secondary to the pursuit of the right color in the right space - or as Boston painter George Nick says, painting is always a matter of ‘chasing color.’”