| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Joseph Drapell was born into the German—and later Soviet—occupied small town of Humpolec near Prague. His parents brought up their three boys not to believe in the official propaganda of the occupying regimes. Like the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, Drapell felt that life was elsewhere. He escaped his birth country at his first opportunity at the age of twenty-five to develop his art in the free West. Drapell aimed to contribute to the art of painting, rather than to merely make a living as an artist. He landed in Halifax in 1966, grateful to Canada for accepting him. Between 1968 and 1970, he studied at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills (MI), where he first started to develop his compression technique as a response to the paintings of Morris Louis, the American painter. Drapell settled in Toronto in 1970 and adopted an island (B-109) in Georgian Bay as his new spiritual home. The island has directly and indirectly inspired all his mature artistic developments to date.
In 1971, Drapell walked the streets of New York with a roll of paintings until he was discovered by the Robert Elkon Gallery on Madison Avenue. After three exhibitions there, and several in Toronto, at the Dunkelman Gallery, Drapell achieved his first artistic breakthrough in 1974 with the Great Spirit Paintings. In 1978, Drapell came together with eleven other abstract artists to form the New New Painters, with whom he has exhibited since 1991. In 1998, he and his wife, poet Anna Maclachlan, co-founded the Museum of New in Toronto to promote the work of the New New Painters and others. The Museum of New has hosted a retrospective and printed three catalogues of Drapell’s work, which has been shown throughout Canada, the USA, Europe, and Asia in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and is held in public and corporate collections globally.
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