Grant Drumheller

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Grant Drumheller is a painter and professor of art at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA. He studied at Boston University where his most influential teachers were Philip Guston, James Weeks, and Reed Kay, and he received his BFA in 1976 and MFA in 1978.

Drumheller has been the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Grant in Painting to Italy. He has also been the recipient of a Blanche Colman Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship, a New England Foundation for the Arts Grant and a grant from the Pollock- Krasner Foundation. Most recently he was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2009.

Drumheller has had numerous exhibitions, including one person shows at the Galleria Inquadrature in Florence, Italy, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, the Creiger-Dane Gallery in Boston. Massachusetts. His work is currently on exhibit at the George Marshall Store Gallery In York Harbor, ME. He will be the subject of one person exhibitions at The Greenhut Galleries in Portland, Maine, and the Grace Institute in New York. He lives in New Castle, New Hampshire with his wife, Karina.

Gathering in a public square is a way of life all over the world, and for me there’s something compelling about seeing groups of people interacting from an aerial perspective. I started painting crowds several years ago when, after a residency at the American Academy in Rome, I set my video camera in a hotel window above the Pantheon and recorded people below interacting at all hours of the day and night. My intention in this suite of paintings is to create an all-over, democratic area of engagement where the figures and the space form a kind of unified visual field.

Even before I began painting the large groups of human figures, I used to paint crowds of animals. (The models were toy beasts set up in migrating groups on my studio floor – virtual savannahs seen from above.) The influence for this series of paintings was a trip with my family to France when I visited the grotto of Peche Merle where I saw stunning primitive wall murals. As it happens all these sorts of images overlap in my studio practice, worked on simultaneously––paintings of family, human crowds, and the animal tableaux. For me they are all part of the ceaseless striving to achieve the right light, the right color, and the implied narrative.

These paintings constitute the long-term repertoire of subjects I love to paint: human figures in natural and urban spaces, my daughters and my wife, and groupings of animals. Light and color unify these subjects for me, and light has come to take on mythic importance in my work. The act of painting is really a way to draw with color. No matter how complicated the idea or powerful the unconscious obsession behind the work, all of it is ultimately secondary to the pursuit of the right color in the right space––or as Boston painter George Nick says, painting is always a matter of “chasing color”.

INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS

2015 Grant Drumheller, Between Worlds, Gordon College, Barrington Center for the Arts, August 29-October 10.
2014 Grant Drumheller,George Marshall Store Gallery, York Harbor, Maine.June
2013 New Paintings, Prince Street Gallery, New York, NY. May-June
2011 Paintings, Greenhut Galleries, Portland, Maine. Fall
2011 Recent Work, Grace Institute, New York, NY. March
2009 Corridor Show, A Small Selection of Recent Works, Greenhut Galleries, Portland, Maine. June
2006 Recent Work, Dock Level Gallery, George Marshall Store Gallery, York Harbor, ME.
2004 A Private View, George Sherman Union Gallery, Boston University, Katherine French, Curator. Catalog. Traveling to Montserrat
College of Art, Beverly, MA, and Amherst College, Amherst, MA.
2002 New Paintings, George Marshall Gallery, York, ME. Mary Harding, Curator.
1999 Self Portraits: Where I’m Calling From, Creiger-Dane Gallery, Boston, MA
Grant Drumheller, The Rye Gallery, Rye, NH
1996 Landscapes 1991-1996, Hess Gallery, Pine Manor College, Chestnut Hill, MA
1991 Monotypes and Paintings, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH
1988-86 David Brown Gallery, Provincetown, MA
1986 Van Buren, Brazelton, Cutting Gallery, Cambridge, MA
1984 Paintings, Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, NY
1981 Recent Paintings, Bromfield Gallery, Boston.
1979 Fulbright-Hays, Galleria Inquadrature, Florence, Italy

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2009 A Dog’s Life, Memphis College of Art, April. Catalog
2010-08 The Portland Show, Greenhut Galleries, Portland, ME, December
2007 In Residence: Artists and the MacDowell Colony Experience, for the
100th Anniversary of MacDowell Colony. Keene State College and UNH Galleries.
2007 Pearlstein Selects, Prince Street Gallery Competition, New York, NY, January
2006 NH Painting in the 21st Century, Kimball Jenkins School of Art and, Plymouth State U.
2010-02 George Marshall Gallery, York, ME, Mary Harding, Curator
2009-99 G Watson Gallery, Stonington, ME
2010-89 Faculty Review, Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH
1998 Here and There, Creiger-Dane Gallery, Boston
1997 David Brown: The Provincetown Years Revisited. The New Art Center, Newton,MA
Fulbright Alumni, Meridian International Center, Washington, DC. Catalog
1996,83 Brockton Triennial, Brockton Art Museum, Brockton, MA. Catalog
1995-93 Opus 71 Gallery, Hollis, NH
1995 Drawings by Alumni, Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, MA
1994 Courtship: Unity and Diversity, Triplex gallery, Manhattan Community College, NY, NY
New England/New Talent, Fitchburg Art Museum, Catalog
Legacy, Nine Former Students of Philip Guston, New Art Center, Newton, MA.
1993 National Competition, First Street Gallery, New York, NY.
1991 Four Person Show, The Golden Gallery, Boston, MA.
The Natural Perception, Gallery at Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
New Acquisitions, Dept of Prints and Drawings, Boston Public Library, Boston, MA
1989 Walter Chrysler, The Provincetown Years, Katzen-Brown Gallery, New York, NY.
1985 The Classic Tradition, Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT. Catalog
Beyond Antiquity, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. Catalog
1985-82 Bess Cutler Gallery, New York, NY.
1984 The Figure Again, New Painting and Sculpture, Currier Gallery of Art., Manchester, NH
And the Livin’ is Easy, Visual Arts Museum, New York, NY. Lowery Sims, curator.
1983 Former Finalists and Fellows of the Artist’s Foundation. New Art Center, Newton, MA
1982 MacDowell Colony Fellows, Van Buren, Brazelton, Cutting Gallery, Cambridge, MA.
Fulbright Hays Alumni, Pace University Gallery, New York, NY
1980 Art of the State, Fellows and Finalists of the Artists’ Foundation,
Federal Reserve Bank, Boston,MA.

COLLECTIONS

Stanley Seeger Collection (Zia Fine Art), Zurich,Switzerland.
Boston Public Library, Prints and Drawings Room.
Fidelity Corporation.
Orange Nassau Corporation

LECTURES & RESIDENCIES

2005 Visiting Speaker, Dartmouth College, Dept of Studio Art. Amherst College, Art Department.
2004,1993 Visiting Speaker, School of Visual Arts, Painting Seminar, Boston University.
Montserrat College of Art. The Art Institute of Boston.
1997,94,89,88,87Art New England Workshops, Painting Instructor, Bennington College.
1999,96,94,86-91Visiting Artist and Drawing Teacher, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College.
2006,1995 Maine College of Art.
1985 Visiting Speaker, Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

2010-2001 Professor of Art, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH
2001-1995 Associate Professor, UNH
1994-1988, Assistant Professor, UNH., 1987-1986, Visiting Artist, UNH
1986-1981 Boston University, Adjunct and fulltime appointments.
1986-1981 Art Institute of Boston, Asst. Professor of Art

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Post-Modernism. Classicism in Modern Art and Architecture, Charles Jencks, Rizzoli, 1987.
Grant Drumheller, Portsmouth Herald, Feature Article by Jeanne McCartin, 3/9/01.
Private View: Paintings by Grant Drumheller, Catalog and Essay by Katherine French, 2004.
Grant Drumheller’s Family Album, Catalog Essay by Charles Simic, 2004

EDUCATION

MFA, BFA cum laude, Boston University, 1978, 1976. Studied with Philip Guston, James Weeks and Reed Kay”

Email Artist Grant Drumheller

Please view the Artist’s Website at www.grantdrumheller.com/