Jen Graves “Exhilarating, Every-time”
https://jengraves.substack.com/p/exhilarating-every-time
Twice each week, when I swim in the saltwater of Puget Sound, I deliver a Creature Report to the members of my household. Today’s report was this: multiple crabs, angrily red-purple; one starfish, dull gray, showing evidence of limb loss; and one possible young flounder, so identified because it resembled an adult flounder but was petite, un-flat, and had eyes on both sides of its head, and I have learned that when flounder mature, their eyes migrate so both eyes are on one side of their heads. I have also learned that flounder, like squid and octopi, have chromatophores, cells in their skin that allow them to change color in order to blend in with the rocks and sand where they hang out. Swimming along in the shallows as I do, very often a piece of the seafloor mosaic rises up and darts off. A flounder! My heart pounds against my wetsuit as if it will leap out and follow the fish. It is exhilarating, every time, and inevitably I find myself smiling down into the water, giddy at feeling involuntarily bonded to this alien world.
After swimming today, I went shopping near Greg Kucera Gallery and stopped in to see what was on. What I discovered was a hall of fantastic, fantastical paintings by Drie Chapek gathered under the title Inside the Outside. These large canvases are shifting mirages made of acrylic and oil, Bits of recognizable imagery pop out from swirling, abstract fields of brush strokes, like camouflaged creatures lying in wait. The titles of the paintings commingle times of day and states of being (Midnight Bliss, Sunbreak Shifting, Midday Living), and the ones I love the best depict wild landscapes and human architectures infiltrating one another, borderless, communing.
MIDDAY LIVING, 2023, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 78 inches (two details from this work appear below)
A roughly hewn waterfall spills along a living-room wall, vaguely tropical waters pooling on the living-room floor, mixing with the sunlight pouring in from the windows. Color and light suffuse objects so that what is solid — a chair, a lamp — may appear to be transparent, as if things were full of their environments rather than the other way around. There is a profound sense of interconnectedness. The visual reversals are dizzying. They are also somehow calming. The imagery, continually unfurling, is happening inside me; we have become joined.
There is something about the way these visions shift and slide that feels familiar to me from my years of swimming. Riding the bus on my way home and looking up the artist, I discovered that Chapek lives locally and swims the same Sound as me nearly every day, and that, also like me, she grew up in the 1980s between households, building her own interior landscape of connections. She traveled “through the air and across land to several homes” where she “experienced different caretakers, environments, and cultures,” she writes. “I searched for solid ground in that motion.” Starting early, like her, I have found truth, love, and belonging in motion, too, and in ruins, mess, trauma. I detect broken illusion in her work. Fracture makes the ongoing fluidity of collage possible. This is something like what Chapek has achieved spatially in her paintings. Swimming is not the subject of the paintings in Inside the Outside, but to me, it feels like swimming is how the paintings work.
Inside the outside is how I feel when I swim. I am free here to move in any direction. The water is its own free and greater thing; it may veto any plans I have. I keep my head down except to breathe, and what I can see is sometimes clear and other times ambiguous, distance and perspective failing to compute as they do on land, to my relief and release. As space morphs underwater, time twists, too. The prehistoric floats and lurks in the present. The views forever fluctuate. A flounder, its ancient stripes suddenly made clear from nowhere, disappears into the cloudy mist of deeper water that always awaits in the immediate distance. Harbor seals appear and disappear this same way, a distant, peripheral flicker that in an instant transforms into a warm-blooded co-swimmer, and just as quickly metamorphoses into a receding ghost. I am inside the outside when I swim, disappearing into the collapsing boundaries between interiority and exteriority, home and away. The relentless flux of the water reconnects me to the sanity-saving truth that everything is always changing anyway. I practice loosening my grip.
Alycia Zollinger “Inside the Outside”
Each of Drie’s works is like a magical mystery tour of given moments in suspended animation. Every Driescape was a beautiful tour de force of the sensual wilderness and dimensionality woven within the human experience. I felt like I was exploring vintage snapshots turned portals into the consciousness of various realms from tropical flora and deep self reflection, to sitting on the grass looking up at the sky and being in social situations with heightened awareness. I love how her titles are like provocative invitations to enter the looking glass of each work.
Soo Hong “Inside the Outside”
Drie makes ghostly effect with heavy load of paint. That is quite a mystery. I feel she loves a somewhere/space that people don’t seem to pay attention to (abandoned?). Then she points out this space with colors that need love and care. Drie’s paint is a touch of care? I saw transitions and morphs of figures. Almost like they are spirits…in that no name space that there is still love. She has love for this place/earth. It made me ponder a day after. I didn’t feel it right away when I saw it. The feeling is lingering and still does.
Elizabeth Murray, My Edmonds News 2024
https://myedmondsnews.com/2024/02/art-beat-artist-drie-chapek-on-her-new-show-inside-the-outside/
Chase Burns, The Stranger 2021
Regina Hackett 2019
Drie Chapek’s paintings have roots in European art history and live in the present moment. I saw Fragonard and a little Tiepolo: All that movement in the sky, the sky rolling through space, and in one a figure dragging the sky down with him to bloom on the ground, like Christ descending the Cross. I like the fierce grace, everything Chapek erased from an old story and everything she left in. Remarkable too was how successful Chapek is in a small space, those short bursts, and also, how much more successful she is with more space to tell a whole story, what Paul Valery once called, the sensation of a story without the boredom of its conveyance.
Lauren Gallow 2019
Drie Chapek’s paintings are psychic moments, embodied. These singular artworks depict the abstractness of that universal inner state of being we all experience, but can rarely assign to one specific moment in time: the state of transformation. Chapek speaks to the ongoing process of evolution that is constantly swirling around us and in us, a process that somehow manages to slip through our fingers, never visible in the moment. It is a process with a clear beginning – birth – and a clear ending – death. Although, as Chapek suggests, perhaps these delineators of the human experience are not so clear cut. Chapek’s paintings give physical form to the deepest paradox of life: that we are alive and dying at the same time.
Each of Chapek’s deliciously layered oil paintings captures the visceral weight of the human experience and the constant, grotesque decay of the physical body. Flesh-colored forms drip and rot, expand and contract. Bright pink blooms decompose and tumble while sunsets bleed across the sky into a soft yellow ground of steaming mud. And yet, somewhere in Chapek’s swirling layers of color and form, life is bursting forth. A new wave crests, a young petal rests lightly on the surface.
When a caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis in its transformation to butterfly, the process is messy. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar – evolution as decay. Transformation is neither an ending nor a beginning, it is something of both. The beautiful violence of this shapeshifting is what Drie Chapek captures in her complex, multilayered paintings. Paintings that are simultaneously soft and sharp, flat and as deep as the ocean, fully alive and beautifully decomposing.
Stephen Hunter for Cascadia Weekly 2019
Chapek has previously shown her paintings at i.e. With “Soul Juice,” she’s at the peak of her game. She paints big, in oil, and surprises by leaving thin washed canvas in pale hues next to thick impasto. She pushes somber blues against pink and faint marigold, orange against green.
Each of her substantial compositions is a rich visual experience. She creates depth not only by impasto, but also by juxtaposing light and dark. “Pleasure” features an irregular, rosy field streaked with red, framed by black on all sides. “Aloft” suggests a mountain peak backed with indigo, sun-washed glaciers tumbling down the front.
Chapek’s “Grounded” mesmerized me. Shrouds in white, yellow, crimson whisper power and majesty—an uncanny congruence to Velasquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X.
She is at her most ambitious with “These Times.” There’s no pictorial hook for the imagination here. Sinews stretch across the canvas, framed by viridian to one side and blood red, the other. Was this what another reviewer described as “fully alive and beautifully decomposing?”
https://www.thegatheredgallery.com/post/drie-chapek
Interview with WAYWARD https://journal.waywardcollective.com/3-x-3-meet-the-artists-of-relish-seattle/