ABOUT GRANT DRUMHELLER AND HIS WORK

Grant Drumheller is a painter in oils. His work was first acknowledged for its use of figurative and symbolic imagery in monumental works evoking allusions to myth and allegory. After receiving a Fulbright-Hays Grant to Italy the year after graduate school, Drumheller and his wife Karina spent 1979 in Florence, Italy. The work from the year's residency was exhibited at the Galleria Inquadrature in Florence.

The influence of the history of art has always been a powerful force in Drumheller's work. During the following decade Drumheller continued to paint the large-scale paintings for which he became known. These large-scale works were inspired in part by the history of painting and sculpture as well as by the ambition and outsized scale that dominated American culture in the early 1980's. Drumheller showed this work frequently and it comprised a one-man show at the Bess Cutler Gallery in New York in 1984-85.

Since then, his work has been exhibited in over 14 one person shows, most recently in a traveling retrospective of small scale intimate works, with a catalog and essay by the noted poet Charles Simic and the curator Katherine French.

In 1998, Grant Drumheller returned to working from observation. In 1999, Drumheller exhibited a suite of twenty-one large and small-scale self-portraits at the Creiger-Dane Gallery in Boston, MA.

Since then, Drumheller has continued to work largely from life exploring the various genres of portraiture, landscape and still life.

Drumheller states, "Recently I have been working the surfaces on my paintings to make the paint a more active element in molding the images. My new work draws from disparate sources; ancient architectural remains, 19C. Photography, domestic interiors, still lives and the familiar terrain of family. My use of Italianate spaces relates to an abiding love of antiquity and evoking the mystery and materiality of the painting process. I am amazed how paint can suggest something contemporary or ancient, beautiful or raw, or flat or round simultaneously. As a group my pictures convey a selective realism and an expression of my experience. As I get older, I return to the same notions about place and individual identity that I portrayed in an overtly imaginary language as a young artist. At this point, the everyday seems most pertinent and poetic to me."

Grant Drumheller's work resides in the Boston Public Library, Fidelity Corporation, Orange Nassau Corporation, the Surf Point Foundation and the Stanley Seeger Collection. In 1986, his work was highlighted in two international survey exhibitions, one at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and the other at the Decordova Museum in Lincoln, MA. In 1987, his work appeared in Post Modernism, Classicism in Modern Art and Architecture, by Charles Jencks (Rizzoli).

Some of the major Grants and Fellowships that Drumheller has received are a New England Foundation for the Arts -NEA Regional Fellowship in Painting in 1996, a Pollock Krasner Fellowship Grant in 1986, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1982, In the same year, Drumheller was a resident at the MacDowell Colony and received an invitation to Yaddo . He has received eight small faculty support grants from the University of New Hampshire where he is a Professor of Art, and co-founder of the Summer Painting Intensive in Ascoli-Piceno, Italy. Grant Drumheller has been a guest speaker and critic at Dartmouth College, Amherst College, Bennington College, Boston University, the Aldrich Museum and DeCordova Museum.