Drew Truslove
Drew Truslove is an Eora/Sydney-based artist whose distinctive ink paintings and drawings distil the complexity and abundance of the Australian landscape through a strikingly original visual language. Working predominantly in ultramarine blue and black, Truslove builds trees, waterways and densely layered terrain through intricate fields of marks – looping, searching lines that double back, thicken and disperse across paper and canvas.
Drawing has been a constant throughout Truslove’s life, though the gestural linearity that now defines his practice began to take shape around a decade ago as he sought a more immediate and individual mode of drawing. Initially developed through portraiture, his fluid, rapidly articulated line soon found its way into studies of his local environment. “The clarity and speed of that ink line is quite striking,” says Truslove, whose practice has since expanded from intimate studies of individual trees into increasingly ambitious riverscapes, bushland panoramas and coastal scenes.
Central to Truslove’s practice is a sustained process of looking. Working across sites including Flat Rock Gully near his lower North Shore home, the river country and rainforest around Jamberoo and, more recently, stretches of the New South Wales coastline, he returns repeatedly to particular places and often approaches a single location from multiple viewpoints. Preliminary drawings are made in situ before larger works are developed on canvas, allowing Truslove to build what he describes as “a series as a survey of what that land looks like right now.” Rather than attempting to reproduce the myriad hues and tones of the landscape, his use of a single colour offers an impression of place, translating its forms and textures into line, density, rhythm and space.
While bushland and river country have long been prevailing concerns, Truslove continues to expand the terrain of his work, moving between landscapes transformed by flooding and, more recently, coastal environments in which human figures appear as understated presences within the larger natural world. Across these shifting subjects, he remains interested in how the economy of a single colour can accommodate the extraordinary complexity of the landscape. Named the recipient of the National Emerging Art Prize’s Award of Excellence in 2024 for Flat Rock, River Crossing, 7th Angle, Truslove has since mounted a succession of solo exhibitions with Michael Reid Galleries, including two large-scale presentations at Michael Reid Southern Highlands – both acquired in their entirety – and was among the stars of Michael Reid Northern Beaches’ Fifth Anniversary group show. His joint representation by the two galleries was announced in spring 2026 ahead of his solo exhibition Waterline – the inaugural presentation at the new Brookvale home of Michael Reid Northern Beaches.
