I primarily paint portraits and interior scenes featuring myself, family and friends in moments from everyday life. These small oil paintings on canvas are rendered with gestural brushwork to capture intimacy through iridescent light and color.

At an early age, I lost my father to cancer. Growing up, I frequently pored over family photos--analyzing the nuances of relationships, love and loss in the images. These nuances make up the psychological undertone of my paintings. In 2019, I experienced a health scare--this, combined with the pandemic in 2020, cultivated an urgency in my work where documenting my life, memories, and the people I love became intrinsic to my practice. 

All my paintings are vignettes within the larger narrative of my life and I hope they suggest a tender complexity and emotional depth to the human experience. My paintings showcase my life and the people I love through a lens–inherently filtered through my own female gaze.

Heather Drayzen is an artist and educator living in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her BFA from School of Visual Arts and her MAT from Rhode Island School of Design. She is continuing her education through the New York City Crit Club.