.
For inquiries please contact hdrayzen@gmail.com
💌 Join my mailing list for occasional newsletter and updates!
Recent Press
Two Coats of Paint Review by Lucas Moran
Artist talk with Kate Sherman hosted by JD Raenbeau at My Pet Ram
Interview with Brainard Carey on Yale Radio
Studio tour and interview with Sam Blank’s Filling the Blank
Bio
Heather Drayzen (b. 1985, San Antonio, TX) is a painter known for her intimate, small-scale depictions of quiet domestic scenes, often portraying herself and her loved ones. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Drayzen earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2007 and her MAT from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Her second solo exhibition, Towards the Sun, opened at My Pet Ram, New York, in October 2025, following her debut solo exhibition at the gallery in May 2024. That same year, she participated in a two-person exhibition at The Middle Room Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2023, her work was featured in a two-person exhibition at My Pet Ram and was included on PLATFORM.
Her work has also been presented in group exhibitions at Massey Klein Gallery (New York, 2025), EDJI Gallery (Brussels, 2025), Noon Projects (Los Angeles, 2024), Myriam Chair Galerie (Paris, 2023), Thierry Goldberg (New York, 2023), and Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, 2023), among others. Her works on paper were included in Trove, presented by Deanna Evans Projects in 2023.
Drayzen has participated in artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (2023) and Hafnarborg, Iceland (2025). In 2026, she was awarded First Prize in the Prisma Art Prize in Rome. Her work was reviewed by Lucas Moran in Two Coats of Paint (2025), and she was interviewed on Brainard Carey’s Yale Radio podcast (2025) and on the Filling in the Blank series with Sam Blank (2025) Her work is held in the Beth Rudin DeWoody Public Collection.
Statement
In 2019, and again in 2023, I experienced health scares that, along with the 2020 pandemic, created an urgency to document my life, memories, and relationships. My paintings grow from my lived experiences, interior world, and emotions—where tenderness, intimacy, and beauty are tools for survival.
I primarily paint small scale domestic scenes in oil on linen, often including myself and those I cherish in quiet reflective moments. These works are shaped by the rhythms of my everyday life with my husband and our dogs, and increasingly by the natural world and the way its beauty sustains me both emotionally and spiritually. Experiences like sharing a meal, drawing together, or taking a nap with the pups unfold in an atmosphere of iridescent golden light, highlighting the passage of time while also nodding to many art historical influences including Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Edvard Munch.
Each work serves as a vignette within a larger ongoing narrative that I imagine as a slow and continuous film or a lifelong poem. Ultimately my paintings are about what matters most: the devotional call to create, to love, to pay attention, and to look towards the light.
.
