Drew Klassen's new paintings are dense, gestural renderings of his experiences of both natural and human-made environments. The result is a fluid, restless interplay between representation and abstraction.
While inspired by scenes from real life, such as a suburban street, a beachfront resort, or the tangled undergrowth of near-equatorial forests, Klassen's recent paintings cannot easily be characterized as landscape. Some of the work describes recognizable, almost generic vistas, but elsewhere the view is almost lost behind densely layered brushwork.
Above all, Klassen wants to tell stories about what he sees: "Painterly issues aside," he said, "I feel there's often a kind of quiet intrigue lying not far beneath the surface of places that may appear mundane at first glance. All these paintings, representational or not, are about getting past first glance".