Contributed by Sharon Butler / I’m delighted to welcome Atlanta-based artist Craig Drennen for a Two Coats of Paint Residency at the end of February. In 2008, Craig happened on Timon of Athens – the only Shakespeare play that never made it to the stage during the Bard’s lifetime. The play spoke to Craig, who grew up in rural West Virginia. It “generated feelings of automatic respect and bruised disappointment simultaneously… it felt like home.” Ever since, he’s been producing different series of paintings for each character in the play. Because each series requires a visual and material shift from the previous one, he refers to his studio practice as “prismatic.”
So far, Craig has finished work for 15 characters, with Cupid, Three Strangers, Page, Fool, and Flavius left to complete. He began his “Merchant” pieces at the start of the pandemic with dot patterns inspired by those early graphic illustrations of the Covid virus. Other imagery is culled from his memory of a laundromat jukebox in central West Virginia he saw in the mid-1970s. Featuring records, quarters, and washing machine windows, these paintings riff on roundness. The T-shaped ones honor Timon himself, but they’re also a nod to Craig’s father – “T” was embroidered on the shirts he wore every day to his factory job – and perhaps to the crucifix, which the shape resembles. In covering the surface with fluorescent orange gestural marks, he brings Pop Art, street art, and Abstract Expressionism insouciantly into the picture.
Artist and writer Deanna Sirlin sees Drennen as “a proverbial bad boy, constantly testing the viewer” in the vein of Duchamp. “He uses his paintings and installations to poke a hole in the fabric of life and art.” He himself might not disagree. “Timon of Athens is a corrupted text of indeterminate history, questionable sources and a dubious relationship to the respected canon,” he said in an interview in Georgia State University Magazine. “That is to say, it mirrors my own position in the art world perfectly.”
About the artist: Craig Drennen (b. 1966, Ohio) is a painter based in Atlanta, GA and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. His recent solo exhibitions include “Merchant, Mistress, and T” at Freight+Volume Gallery in New York and “First Acts” at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Anton Kern Gallery in New York City and the Kunstverein Langenhagen in Langenhagen, Germany. He has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Skowhegan. Reviews of his work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, and the New York Times. Drennen served as dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, teaches at Georgia State University, and manages THE END Project Space. He is represented by Brigitte Mulholland in Paris.
Craig Drennen, Two Coats of Paint Artist Residency, 22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10, Long Island City, NY. February 22-27, 2026. Please join us for an Open Studio on Wednesday, February 25, 5–7 pm. For more information, or to arrange a studio visit, please contact: STAFF@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put STUDIO VISIT in the subject line. Follow Craig on Instagram @craigdrennen
Studio listening: Playlist on Spotify; WRAS FM 88.5; Podcasts: Bad at Sports, Cocaine & Rhinestones, Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast, Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast, London Review of Books: On Satire, London Review of Books: Modern-ish Poets, New Yorker Fiction, New Yorker Poetry, The Paris Review, The Partially Examined Life, The Times Literary Supplement, University of Oxford Poetry with Simon Armitage.
Upcoming shows or events:
February 12–16, 2026 – Palm Springs art fair, solo booth, Palm Springs, CA
February 25–March 1, 2026 – Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles, CA, with Brigitte Mulholland
September 4, 2026 – Brigitte Mulholland, solo exhibition, Paris
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint. Look for her paintings this month at McBride/Dillman on the Lower East Side, 68 Prince Street Gallery in Kingston, NY, and CLEA RSKY in Brooklyn.
