A SYNOPSIS ON HIS PHILOSOPHY OF PAINTING FROM THE MIND OF DREW GENTLE...
To attempt to explain my paintings and how they fit into my creative output, I'm going to explain where the source of my creativity comes from...it's from drawing.
I draw constantly, from when I could first hold a crayon through a long animation career (where I was paid to draw) to today. It's become a stream-of-consciousness for me. The drawings connect my inner feelings about life, my intuitive empathic self, and resonate with the human condition. They're the most direct and most intimate expression of the pure stuff that comes out of my psyche to my hand, and they provide the source material for the more intense, higher amplitude paintings.
While the drawings are sensitive, intimate and intuitive, the paintings are the full orchestra playing a symphony; not music, but the visual artist's array of color, emotion, time harmony, purposeful dissonance, pace, surface, texture, scale and the physicality of painting. It's both intuitive and a disciplined mental exercise balancing and juggling elements of visual composition and what I find to be relevant for today in painting.
I'm working (primarily) with oils, which has a long grand tradition in art, and I get to bounce off this, as well as connect an pay homage to what has come before. I frequently feel I'm being a "Mannerist" painter to the 20th century in that I'm revisiting and referring, often with deference, to Picasso and Matisse through all the expressionists, Giocometti, Pollack, de Kooning, Bacon, Freud, etc., through Warhol and Pop culture, to post modernism to our new century.
I'm looking for a visual solution using all these elements that provide a balance, a harmonic equilibrium of what's come before and my fluid arsenal of expression to develop who and what the "persona" in the painting is dealing with in their life. I'm attempting to create a visual language, not a verbal or a musical one. In this language, being informed by "the arts" is very personal, and about being in teh here and now; the 21st century.
This is my life pursuit and is endless. I'll go to my personal end knowing I've just scratched the surface.
I draw constantly, from when I could first hold a crayon through a long animation career (where I was paid to draw) to today. It's become a stream-of-consciousness for me. The drawings connect my inner feelings about life, my intuitive empathic self, and resonate with the human condition. They're the most direct and most intimate expression of the pure stuff that comes out of my psyche to my hand, and they provide the source material for the more intense, higher amplitude paintings.
While the drawings are sensitive, intimate and intuitive, the paintings are the full orchestra playing a symphony; not music, but the visual artist's array of color, emotion, time harmony, purposeful dissonance, pace, surface, texture, scale and the physicality of painting. It's both intuitive and a disciplined mental exercise balancing and juggling elements of visual composition and what I find to be relevant for today in painting.
I'm working (primarily) with oils, which has a long grand tradition in art, and I get to bounce off this, as well as connect an pay homage to what has come before. I frequently feel I'm being a "Mannerist" painter to the 20th century in that I'm revisiting and referring, often with deference, to Picasso and Matisse through all the expressionists, Giocometti, Pollack, de Kooning, Bacon, Freud, etc., through Warhol and Pop culture, to post modernism to our new century.
I'm looking for a visual solution using all these elements that provide a balance, a harmonic equilibrium of what's come before and my fluid arsenal of expression to develop who and what the "persona" in the painting is dealing with in their life. I'm attempting to create a visual language, not a verbal or a musical one. In this language, being informed by "the arts" is very personal, and about being in teh here and now; the 21st century.
This is my life pursuit and is endless. I'll go to my personal end knowing I've just scratched the surface.
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