📆 On view Thursday, February 15th – Saturday, March 30th
📅 Reception: First Thursday on Thursday, March 7th, 6–8 pm
📍 Greg Kucera Gallery: 212 Third Avenue South, Seattle
⏰ Open Tuesday – Saturday: 10:30 am – 5:30 pm
🎟 Free to view
Drie Chapek’s paintings are heavenly—and I mean that quite literally. Composed of thick goops and globs of oil paint, Chapek often incorporates giant puffy clouds through her work, piling color on top of color, making her forms seem almost architectural. Though she paints abstract pieces, Chapek also sets her swaths of paint inside buildings, studios, and rooms, clashing round paint brush strokes against the rigid angles of windows, archways, and vaulted ceilings. The result is paintings that feel like a mishmash of reality and dreams.
For her latest show, Inside The Outside at Greg Kucera Gallery, Chapek shifts her gaze from the sky to the briny, murky waters of Puget Sound. Partially inspired by her morning ritual of cold water diving, the Edmonds painter’s new body of work is decidedly aqueous—seafoam, teal, stormy gray, azure, and mossy greens are part of nearly every piece.
“When I thought of the title, I was swimming in the Sound and I wanted to honor what the water’s been doing for me,” Chapek told My Edmonds News in a recent interview. “I was inside the outside.” In the show’s painting called “Midday Living,” a shimmering pool cuts through the floorboards of a study. A serene lavender blue pond surrounded by tall, green ferns slowly morphs into the walls of a music room space in “Midnight Bliss” (in My Edmonds News, she said this is her favorite piece).
As the warm days of spring are just on the horizon, Chapek’s Inside The Outside is perhaps the best way to honor the blooming of a new season.
💌 Be Our Pen Pal! Find out what’s happening in Seattle by subscribing to our newsletter.
