The Exotic Mystery of John Alexander's Art
John Alexander is an enigma. One of the most talented and prolific artists of our day-and arguably Texas' foremost contribution to the rise of American painting since Robert Rauschenberg's emergence in the early 1950's—Alexander defies all conventional labels. He lacks the cynicism of Pop Art, the programmatic imperative of non-figurative painting, or the pure emotionalism of Neo-expressionism. In a word, he is a Romantic, in the tradition of Blake, Palmer, and Turner, as well as Goya, but he paints with the revolutionary zeal of the young Courbet or the Belgian proto-surrealist James Ensor. His closest contemporary parallel may lie with the protagonists of this century's most vigorous post-modernist tendencies-Bacon, Freud, or even Stanley Spencer.
All of this makes sense given the unique circumstances of Alexander's upbringing. John was born at the end of the Second World War in Beaumont, Texas, to a father who was an oil engineer nearing retirement and a mother three and one-half decades his junior. His early memories were of the countless hours spent in the local Baptist church as a choirboy and acolyte, from whose fundamentalism he rebelled at an early age, and the fishing expeditions conducted with his father through the swampy marshlands of the Bayou and on the Gulf Coast in search of exotic fauna and wildlife. Alexander remained in rural isolation in southeast Texas for high school and college before entering graduate school in Dallas' S.M.U. in 1969, where he stubbornly adhered to traditional painting in defiance of the predominant interest in minimalism and conceptual art among his fellow students. Upon graduation John moved to Houston and took up a position as a member of the art faculty of the University of Houston. His work from this period reflected his growing distrust of the church and his awareness of the racial and social hypocrisies vested in many institutions of authority, particularly big business and government. Not surprisingly, he steered his art away from nature, except as a metaphor for some human foible, and more in the direction of highly-satirical narratives, a form of portraiture that tended to debunk rather than idealize its subjects. Then, in the late seventies, fueled as much by ambition as by rebellion, Alexander forsook Texas for New York, first Soho and later the idyllic hamlet of Amagansett on the south shore of Long Island where he settled in an eighteenth-century farmhouse on three acres of land by the sea and joined the local brigade of firefighters. In this latter refuge, so reminiscent of his rural Bayou roots, Alexander rekindled his love of nature as well as his favorite pastime, that of fishing, and began creating his own version of Monet's Giverny, complete in this case with a pond surrounded by rich vegetation and flowering plants. Concurrently, the subject of his work evolved from political and social satire to issues having to do with nature as a metaphor for good and evil, life and death, decay and destruction. While developing in this new direction he never ceased to seek new means to manipulate paint to capture the ebb and flow of plant and animal life. In a word, he became a great landscape and still-life artist whose aptitude for realism, particularly evident in his masterful nature studies, has drawn justifiable comparisons with the naturalism of so great a forbearer as Albrecht Dürer.
Today, John Alexander stands at a crossroads. He has battled and conquered his unrestrained contempt for authority; he has earned fame and fortune in his work; he has remained true to his vision as witness to man's struggle for survival in a world fraught with temptation. In his idiosyncratic yet profound manner, John Alexander demonstrates the fallacy of appearances. For him everything is a symbol-religious or otherwise-and must be understood in relation to some universal theme. His art bears testimony to the sublime beauty of nature whose exoticism helps us understand the mysteries of life itself. In his own words, he wants his art "to be highly personal and very much about my interpretation, my reflection of what my experiences in the world have been, not in an illustrative way, but in a real emotional way that is universal."Edmund P. Pillsbury C.E.O.
