Artist Bio
Abigail Drapkin is a painter from Midcoast Maine. She earned her MFA in Painting + Drawing from the University of Washington in 2019 and her BA in Studio Art and French from Brandeis University in 2012. Abigail is a lifelong learner and art teacher, and is proud to have taught students aged 5 to 85. She currently teaches undergrads at Lake Washington Institute of Technology and the University of Washington, where she enjoys guiding students through the creative process and sharpening their unique point of view through their art.
Abigail has exhibited her work in group shows and solo showcases in Seattle, San Francisco, Massachusetts, Maine, and abroad. She recently exhibited large oil paintings in the group show "What's the Story" at Chatwin Arts in Pioneer Square, Seattle. Her solo exhibition “The Window” opened at Magnuson Park Gallery in Seattle in 2023. In 2019, Abigail exhibited her MFA thesis work including prints and large monochromatic paintings at the Henry Art Gallery. Other group exhibitions include shows at Studio Gallery, Avenue 12 Gallery, and SMASH Gallery in San Francisco. In 2018, Abigail was awarded a two-week residency in Singapore through LaSalle College of the Arts, where she created a series of etchings exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore.
Artist Statement
Interiority in my paintings is both a setting and a frame of mind. The figures push into corners, lie upside down, and wedge against each other in small spaces. These psychological interiors at times shatter into geometric fragments, hinting at an unsettled state. Much of my work stems from my experience of womanhood and the influence of the women around me, my mother, sister, friends, and models. I often begin a painting directly from observation with my subjects sitting, engaging in conversation with them while I work. As I continue to paint after they have gone, each layered mark is a search for balance between what I see and what I feel as I reflect on our conversations about motherhood, relationships, caregiving, aging bodies, and domestic life. The paintings press pause on the whirling reel of responsibility, showing still figures reading, laying, sitting, sleeping, gazing, or suspended in a holding pattern. The books, seedlings, artichokes, newspapers, and spools of thread hint at the debris of living, symbols of the shifting roles of women and the barrage of the news cycle that exists outside the picture plane.
My fascination with geometric figuration began when I first saw the painting Plans pars couleurs by Frantisek Kupka at the Centre Pompidou while studying abroad in France in 2011. I was fascinated by the vertical divisions, the way the figure seemed embedded in layers of light, like stained glass or an x-ray. Since then, my work has leaned towards figuration but frequently brushes with abstraction through
shapes of light, overlapping forms evoking movement, and structures formed by the grids, armatures, and measuring marks of the drawing and painting process. In my current work, I find patterns and webs in which colors become more vivid or muted, and parts of the figure merge with the setting.
Printmaking in my practice brings unexpected outcomes and new ways to look at my paintings. I make collagraphs from found materials and woodcuts where mark-making and textures disrupt the clarity of the image. In these works, printed in vivid blues and velvety blacks, the suggestion of a figure, a window, or a bed evoke both presence and absence.
Many of my compositions reference paintings by Kupka, Klimt, Bonnard, Munch, Diebenkorn and the long history of men painting women. My works subvert the male gaze: Instead of a suggestive glimpse, a male fantasy of a woman’s private moments, I paint myself and my friends, our awkwardness, stillness, lived experiences, dreams, and memories. In my paintings, bodies dissolve into geometries, the clarity of exterior forms disappearing to reveal the complexity of their inner lives.