Waterline

Eora/Sydney-based artist, Drew Truslove turns his attention to the Australian coastline. Working with a single colour—a luminous, mineral blue – Truslove’s landscape are drawn in near-continuous fields of marks, looping, searching and restless. His line doubles back, thickens and disperses, at times so fine it seems to hover just above the canvas, then gathering weight along the spine of a trunk, or in the articulation of roots gripping the bank. Ink proves uniquely suited to this task. It follows the slip of a hand without resistance, registering each pause and surge of confidence. Drew Truslove proposes a different way of seeing landscape. In choosing ink as the final medium, he makes a decisive claim: that a line and a single colour – drawn with clarity, patience, and an acute responsiveness to the world – can hold the vastness, force, and subtlety of a landscape. Named Runner-Up in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, and recipient of the Award of Excellence in the Morgans Financial Prize for an Emerging Painter for ‘Flat Rock, River Crossing, 7th Angle’, Truslove is an artist of growing stature. Waterlines is his fourth solo collection with Michael Reid – with his prior three collections selling out in their entirety.

“I am an Australian artist who works predominantly in ink on canvas. This current series leans into the human experience of beaches, with people playing in the shallows and strolling on the sand. We spend a lot of time in the water as a family and I love capturing those shoreline interactions with people fossicking about the shoreline. The humans are quite secondary in this series; I find myself portraying people in landscapes in a fairly rudimentary and brief way, cameos against the backdrop of the star of the show. I’ve enjoyed looking different ways of representing the water and look at the different kinds of trees that we see on these coastal landscapes.”