While John Alexander’s achievement as a painter continues to win accolades, his prowess as a consummate draftsmen has only recently emerged. This latent recognition should come as no surprise. Invariably, painters resort to paper to record an impression, producing works that make up in spontaneity what by intention they lack in finish.
For those who relish art the name John Alexander brings to mind buttery oil paint, signature whiplash brushstrokes, and canvases that represent nature as mysterious and never entirely benign. In this exhibition we see a less familiar side of the artist’s work: not the panoramic seascapes, overgrown gardens and teeming swamps he’s painted for more than 3 decades, but a drawn world of great refinement.
John Alexander, a Texan, first gained prominence as a regionalist specializing in lush, painterly depictions of swamp and cartoonish paintings of humans and animals that satirized the conflict between civilization and the wild. His new landscapes, painted over the last two years, look back at the bayou but also study the woods and waters around eastern Long Island, his current home.
John Alexander: Grand Illusions by Jane Livingston John Alexander is a painter whose ambitions have always been heroic, all encompassing. He has consciously taken a stance in a tradition of paint that at first we identify as expressionist, but that reaches back before revolutionary artists of the early twentieth century, to the narrative and religious…