DREW

Working from the studio he built himself in Lydd on Romney Marsh, Drew creates paintings and sculptural pieces predominantly from found and salvaged objects and materials. Industrial, mechanical and rural remnants can all find their way into the work.

His Icarus series is a brilliant example. Drew has used sections of approximately 100-year-old leaf-spring suspension from a First World War Thornycroft vehicle, mounting these fragments of engineering history onto reclaimed wood.

There is already a story inside the material before Drew touches it. His intervention simply gives that story somewhere new to travel.

The same philosophy continues into his painting. Leftover tins of emulsion, discarded spray paints and materials recovered from skips and garage clearances can all become part of the palette. One description of his work notes that these materials are ultimately sealed beneath floor varnish. Sarah Graham Art

Even the frames can continue that conversation. Drew uses found architectural material and salvaged architrave, meaning the artwork doesn't necessarily stop where the painted surface ends.

I particularly like that.

Nothing has to be pristine before it becomes valuable.

Nothing needs to have been purchased from an art supplier before it can become art. Sometimes the material with the scratches, dents, previous purpose and unknown history is precisely the material worth keeping.

Romney Marsh Through Different Eyes

Drew's surroundings also find their way into the paintings.
Romney Marsh isn't represented simply as picturesque countryside. The things that interrupt the landscape matter too.

Electricity pylons.
Wind turbines.
Abandoned buildings.
Industrial structures.
The enormous flatness of the Marsh itself.

There is something very appropriate about an outsider artist being interested in the parts of a landscape that might traditionally be edited out of the postcard.

His paintings can move between those surroundings, still life and interiors, often approached through a deliberately distorted or almost naïve perspective.

And then comes the colour.

Bright greens, pinks, blues and yellows twist through the compositions. Shapes collide. Perspective shifts. Familiar things become slightly unfamiliar.

That is what initially caught my attention. Before I knew the story, I recognised the language.

Perhaps the detail that has stayed with me most is simply this: Six years.

It would be easy to look at the amount of work Drew has produced, the distinctive visual identity, the studio, exhibitions and everything surrounding the practice and assume this had been happening for decades.

It hasn't.

That makes me respect the work ethic my family had already told me about even more. It also reinforces something I increasingly believe through Imaginative Reaction.

There isn't one correct route into art.
Some people go to art school.
Some grow up surrounded by galleries.
Some return to creativity later in life.
Some work quietly for decades before anybody notices.
And occasionally somebody gets challenged, thinks right then, builds a studio and starts painting.

Art is better for having all of them.