Poets, Painters, and Servants
An Interview with Craig Drennen
By Colleen Asper
Craig Drennen is a painter of unpopular culture. For five years he made work based on the 1984 movie Supergirl, a spinoff largely regarded as a failure and left out of the Superman canon, and from 2008 to the present he has worked with Timon of Athens, a rarely produced, unfinished play by Shakespeare. Drennen is realizing Timon of Athens character by character through works built from references that are temporally and geographically at hand, suturing the works more tightly to the artist than their source text. A broad range of illusionistic devices and drawn and painted marks are gathered together to create personas in a way that is neither explicitly pictorial nor plainly descriptive. The character Poet is represented by a painting of the word “Hello,” a basketball and a 24-second clock, while a photograph of a vampire and a monochrome painting become the character of the Old Athenian. What we are left with is less a reimagining of the play than a representation and performance.
I had the opportunity to interview Drennen while he was preparing for his shows “Poet & Awful,” at Samsøn Gallery, Boston, Mass. (Oct. 31-Dec. 17, 2014) and “We Should Talk to Each Other, The Cloud and I,” Byrd Gallery, Georgia Regents University, Augusta, Ga. (Oct. 30-Nov. 21, 2014)