Galerie St-Laurent + Hill presents:
Drew Klassen
Bloemstukken
September 4 - 23
Vernissage: Thursday, Sept 4, 5:00 - 8:00pm
Klassen Statement:
Growing up, I used to watch my grandmother paint in her spare bedroom, which served as her studio. Often she’d paint flowers. Sometimes, to keep me occupied, she would give me a small panel and a palette of dabs of oil paints (toxicity notwithstanding), and I’d try to paint what she was painting. She sometimes painted landscapes, and sometimes flowers. My first oil painting was a small copy of one of her flower paintings, signed on the back: ‘flowers, by andrew’ in orange crayon.
I haven’t always been a painter of flowers. At first, I just painted what I saw around me but more recently, I’ve appreciated the rigour and shape to the flower paintings by traditional Dutch or Flemish painters—paintings that moved away from simply depicting flowers in a plain botanical sense, but also gave structure, and which pointed towards a framework of abstraction. At the time, these paintings were simply called ‘flower pieces’, or, in the tradition, ‘bloemstukken.’
Klassen Biography:
Drew Klassen was born in Toronto, and lived there until he was about four months old. He then settled in Winnipeg, along with his parents. His grandmother, a draughtsperson by profession and avid painter by inclination, lived close by, and usually looked after him when his parents were out for an evening, or traveling. To keep him occupied, she would often give him a pencil and spread out a discarded blueprint for him to draw on, or give him a small canvas panel and a small palette of her oil paints to play with while he watched her paint. He didn’t dream a child’s dream of being an artist, but those early years inculcated a habit of looking at things carefully, and describing them with a pencil and imagination.
Fast forward to 1986: Klassen enrolled at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, in Halifax, where he studied drawing, sculpture, and typography. During his studies at NSCAD, his family urged him to take up a ‘sensible’ profession, and eventually he enrolled at the Dalhousie University School of Architecture, and graduated with a Master’s degree in architecture in 1992. But the year of his graduation was at the beginning of a global recession, and architectural work was sparse, so he returned to his first loves: painting and drawing. His current work tries to combine the two.
Klassen currently lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
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