Drew Dodge

Drew Dodge (b. 2001) is an artist based in New York City. He received a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2022.

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memory/

As an artist, it’s my job to absorb everything around me. I observe my surroundings and listen to myself, my environment, and others.

When I lived in Arizona as a child, I had to drive for hours through a barren wasteland of dirt to see my father each weekend. It was a formative experience–looking out a car window at nothing but land and navigating the complexities of growing up queer with divorced parents. My thoughts and spirit began to entwine with the landscape in those moments. Driving through an empty desert offered a moment of solitude, questioning, intensity, peace, transition, confusion, and clarity. The desert was my blank canvas: absorbent, receptive, private, and a space where I could honestly sit with myself.

The desert is a severe landscape, but there is an openness and mystery to what can exist there, removed from society and social norms. You can arrange the rocks and features there, shaping the desert into your own landscape. Many of my motifs come from the desert. I’m fascinated by cacti and how they mimic human bodies. They’re fleshy and have arms. The spines of the cacti mirror the figures I paint, which are bristling and spiny. When their flesh decays, they reveal skeletal structures underneath.

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Drawing is a great exercise because you’re only faced with a white paper and yourself. It’s a moment where you can listen to yourself think. When I draw, it's more of a quick, calligraphic method that encourages instinct, form, and idea to collide. Drawing is like writing in a diary. I like to be alone and hold my sketchbook close to myself, letting the pages become cluttered with ideas. Drawing allows me to listen to my instincts and understand what ideas are meaningful to me, which I develop later into paintings.

As a student, I was looking at religious paintings because they are so impressive. I reference their compositions and poses, drawing from the intentionality that exists in religious painting. These paintings provide a guide for visualizing spirit. Alignment in the composition communicates the synergy between the figures and nature. When the moon is aligned with the figures’ legs, this moment feels specific, like they are in the right place at the right time. My paintings always come back to an intensity of emotion and experience, and religious images, such as Saint Sebastian pinned to a tree by arrows, can communicate that. The figures in my paintings may face the immense heat of the volcano or are tied to a tree with a skull or perform an impossible task in the desert.

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I jumped directly into this imaginary world when I first started painting. Even my early works included this dog creature, the sky, and the moon. I created these dog creatures because I wanted an ambiguous figure I could separate from myself, others, and society. I’m fascinated by slowly uncovering the rules of how they live. I can introduce them to new environments, elements, and behaviors to write their story. I like the figures to be flirtatious towards each other and place them in sensual and tender poses. I mirror that in the landscape. When I paint plants, the leaves twist together, creating a soulful, loving relationship in the scene.

I’m also attracted to the human and animal aspects of these figures. At first, I was interested in the sensation of hair-covered fingertips and heightening sensation in that way. These hairy creatures allow me to be vulnerable in the work, because they are like myself in disguise, simultaneously me and not me.

I used to paint live bulls because I was interested in how art history and society have encoded the bull as a masculine and ravaging creature. Over time, I became interested in approaching the bull through a queer perspective. I began looking at its skull. The skull is a vessel that holds memory, holding masculine elements in its horns and femininity in its eye sockets. I made the bull more sensitive. I was also curious how the figures would interact with this skull. Sometimes it’s a sexual object, other times, they’re using it as a tool, cradling it, or having a confrontation with it. The skull is an ambiguous instrument I can endlessly play with.

When I'm painting, it often feels very musical. I begin with the background, laying down gestural washes of color for the sky, land, and rocks. If I want to define the features of a rock, I flick and carve out the shapes with white paint–it’s calligraphic. The sense of movement in my paintings comes with the speed of these early gestural layers. The figures involve much more control and weight. I begin with the dark silhouette, then paint layers and layers of crisp, individual hairs, which give the figures depth and texture. Painting the hairs is labor intensive and meditative. I want the painting to reach a state of tangibility, where the whole image feels both real and surreal.