Drew Knapp is a visual artist working in a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, woodworking, and photography.

Knapp's work displays a highly personal synthesis of intermixing materials and methods, encompassing both technical experimentation and spiritual growth.

It is improvisational, non-objective and organic, and is reflective of nature: evoking landscapes, cloud formations, tree shapes, stained glass, sidewalk cracks, ancient stone walls, and biological transformations. Many of the forms and processes are inspired by observations the artist made while restoring historic edifices. The oil paintings: thick, crusty and liquid, are executed on unstretched canvas and mounted on paper, rectangular but slightly irregular. Airbrush, silkscreen, collage, wood, metal and plaster inlay are freely intermingled, forming a quirky tapestry of passion, sensuality and monastic asceticism.

Knapp, originally of Livingston, N.J., began his training with Edwin Havas at Seton Hall Preparatory School, and then attended The Cooper Union where he studied principally with Stefano Cusumano. He graduated in 1975 and joined City Without Walls in Newark, N.J., helping to establish an art gallery, traveling exhibition, workshops and an urban street theater company. He subsequently taught art history at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts.

In 1978 Mr. Knapp was awarded a Rotary Fellowship to study at Villa Schifanoia in Florence, Italy, and received his M.A. in painting, drawing and printmaking from that institution in 1979. Knapp lived in Florence for six years, during which time he taught at Studio Art Centers International, continued his studies privately with American painter Leonard Meiselman, and undertook his first restoration of an historic property, located in the mountains of Loro Ciuffenna, Provincia di Arezzo.

After returning to the U.S. in 1984 he taught successively at St. Benedict's Preparatory School, the Newark Board of Education, and The Montclair Kimberley Academy. He also continued restoration of antique houses, completing several major projects in New Jersey. In 1988 he won a prestigious award from Chemical Bank for his work on a two family house in Newark.

In recent years Knapp has exhibited with Studio Montclair, The Space, and Six Men Working. He continues involvement with restoration and development in both Montclair, N.J. and Woodstock, N.Y., where he is pursuing his dream of building a house, studio, woodshop, wine hermitage, and treehouse in the rugged terrain bordering the Indian Head Mountain Reserve.

Drew Knapp's artwork is in numerous private and public collections in the United States and abroad, including: Price Waterhouse Coopers, Newark Benedictine Abbey, The Forbes Collection, Accudata Systems, and the late Manuel Alvarez Bravo.