works by Drew DiPasquale

April 3 - April 26 | Art 'Round Town / Friday, April 3 / 5 - 8pm

This work began with my children. They are learning about animals right now. Not just names, but how to see, how to invent, how to fill in what they don’t yet know. They say things like “we gotta pop off these alligators” or “camel deer rover,” and suddenly a creature needs to exist. From listening, I find they offer a new language and strange logic. I translate this through paint, collage, and gesture. The work unfolds as a kind of intergenerational inquiry. They process the natural world through play and invention, and I follow, playing interpreter to build from their viewpoint rather than correcting it with my own historical knowledge.

As the creatures in these paintings emerge, they assemble themselves from fragments of our current physical and spiritual debris. They begin to exist on their own terms, in their own words, in their own future. If they appear unfamiliar or speak strangely, it is because we are encountering them from our past.

This is a different wild: one that did not return to what once was, but evolved beyond our systems of naming, hierarchy, and use. These works sit with the grief of a diminishing wild while also proposing something hopeful: a future where wildness persisted, adapted, and shaped itself, outside of our control.

Drew is an artist and father of two living in Portsmouth, NH. He's built his practice through deep study of art history, collaborations with artists locally and internationally, and relentless experimentation in the studio. Every opportunity becomes a way to expand his visual vocabulary; one that exists before words, in the space where feeling and material meet. Each painting is a negotiation between control and chaos, memory and invention. His continuous practice connects him with the raw immediacy of seeing and making, where imagination doesn't need permission or explanation.