ARTIST STATEMENT

Since 2008 Drennen has centered his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon Athens.  Drennen produces a stylistically distinct body of paintings for each character in the play, treating style as a unique information system instead of a simple menu option.  This led Drennen into a “prismatic” studio practice, where the information stream provided by Timon of Athens refracts out into a full spectrum of characters’ works.  Any character can be an entry point into the entire project, but no single character reveals the project’s full scope. Drennen’s most recent characters, notably Merchant, Timon, and Jeweler, constitute his most ambitious works yet. The Merchant pieces are tondos depicting vinyl records and paper money in compositions derived from early illustrations of the Covid virus.  The Timon pieces are T-shaped paintings filled with abstract expressionist marks executed in fluorescent orange oil paint, a color lacking ready art historical references.  The Jeweler pieces are gray lines of any length painted directly onto the wall with cast hydrocal shapes added along the line in the manner of an ankle bracelet. Drennen has worked on this project for 17 years, and he will continue until he addresses the entire cast of the play.  His project has become a slow-moving intervention into the Western canon, leading to a future where Timon of Athens will be known not as Shakespeare’s, but as his.