I had the opportunity over the weekend to attend a gouache workshop at the Delaware College of Art and Design (where I teach a course in Animation for the Web), conducted by Catherine Drabkin.
Drabkin was a founding faculty member of the college, and has recently relocated to Pittsburgh.
Drabkin works in oil and drawing media as well as gouache, with an emphasis on the latter. She uses that often overlooked medium’s characteristics to advantage, with bright, expressively colored paintings that are simultaneously painterly and graphic in their use of flat areas of color. She breaks her forms up into geometric planes with crisp chunks of color and keeps a nice balance between simplicity and detail.
Drabkin has recently completed a new book showcasing her work inspired by her neighborhood in Wilmington while she was living there, Finding Home: an American Neighborhood. I don’t have a link for the book yet, but you can see some of her cityscapes of the area in the “Midtown Brandywine” section of her website.
Drabkin is represented by Kraushaar Galleries in New York.