Facebook X Email Print Save Story When Adam Dressner was twelve, he moved with his father to a two-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of a building in the Peter Cooper Village housing development, in Manhattan. His dad has moved out, but Dressner, now forty-four, has left only three times: to go college, graduate school, and law school. In the summer of 2009, before starting as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell, he went to the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum and emerged a changed man.
He loved making art as a kid, but gave up on painting after a failed foray into oils. Now, with the assistance of “Oil Painting for Dummies,” he threw himself into the medium again, only to discover that an eighty-hour workweek left little time for the easel. Shortly before the pandemic, he quit corporate law to commit himself to painting.
On a late-summer Friday, Dressner was in his home studio, with Clover, his gregarious twelve-year-old mutt. A decommissioned library card catalogue held brushes and paint tubes. “That’s probably the only piece of furniture in here,” he said.
He is slim, with dark hair and startling blue eyes that match the cerulean ball cap he refuses to be seen without (he has three). He was in the final stages of prepping his first solo show, “Hello Stranger,” which was scheduled to open soon in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall. Canvases were propped and stacked everywhere.
Many of Dressner’s paintings are big—some are.