Charlie Ng
Windows were Drew Englander's eyes into the outside world when he was locked down in his New York studio during the pandemic. So fittingly, they became the subject of his latest paintings.
Real World is the American visual artist's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong since joining the Woaw gallery program last year.
He is known for using bold colors, distorted perspectives and hard-edged chiaroscuro to depict a world that is skewed but still familiar.
His style is influenced by his daily life - such as digital technology, sports and entertainment, virtual reality and art history - so using windows as his subject fits right in.
Combining digital and analogue methods, he first makes observational sketches with an iPad then paints with acrylics.
As he is only 37, it seems fame may have come early for this fine-arts graduate but he said the path to becoming a full-time artist was not easy. "I worked plenty of other jobs to support it," he said.
One of his biggest side gigs was being a singer-songwriter under the pseudonym of Realmusic. The passion for music obviously shaped his artistic side and style. He still plays the guitar almost every day.
Apart from that, moving from Denver to Brooklyn was another big influence as he was exposed to one of the most culturally diverse and inclusive cities in the world.
"A big thing it has done for me is force me to find my own voice and find my own way in it all, because there can be a lot of noise surrounding you at all times. It's hard to escape, and it's easy to get sucked into this thing or that," Englander said. "So it definitely forced me to look inside of myself, and figure out what I was really interested in, what I really wanted to say or think about, that sort of thing."
The style of Englander's painting shows the distorted domestic settings from the first person point of view while the sources were all taken from his immediate surroundings.
This idea of painting domestic scenes was boosted around the time when Covid was first introduced to the world, and when quarantines and lockdowns were the new normal.
And the windows present in some of the paintings, like California Dreaming and Swish II, show the blurry scenery from the outside world which Englander calls an escape.
"The paintings are basically just various instances of me sitting in a room and going back and forth, battling to be both in the present moment and going for the escape out the window," he said.
"Not literally, but like falling into the dream world, or disconnecting from reality and disassociating a little bit. So it's a back and forth between those two."
What others may see as daydreaming is actually inspiration for Englander. "I'm always looking up through the window to the other larger spaces. In a way, they're an escape from the confinement of city life or small apartments," he said.
"They're like little daydreams, drifting out of the room and out of the window. They're impressionistic. So they're more in the imaginary world, whereas the spaces are the here and now, like the inside of buildings."
Real World will be on show until January 10 at Woaw Gallery Wan Chai.
