Galerie St-Laurent + Hill presents: Drew Klassen- Bloemstukken

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.’


Galerie St-Laurent + Hill
293 Dalhousie Street
Ottawa, Canada
K1N 7E5