Alexandra Warren
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008Alexandra Warren was born in New York but spent most of her childhood growing up in Greece. The colours, the light and motifs of the Greek islands, her childhood home, are still very much evident in her paintings today.
She started her painting career on the Greek island of Paros at the Aegean Centre for Fine Arts. Later she received a degree in painting from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design.
The biggest influences on her paintings have been the Byzantine icons of her youth and the Madonna and child depictions of the Italian Renaissance, which she studied while living in Florence. These turned her paintings from abstract expressionism towards the figurative style that she is now known for.
She describes her paintings as ‘internal portraits’. Her figures, although non-representational, are always real persons to her, the all-important colours representing particular aspects of the person’s character or emotional state.
Alexandra paints in oil on large canvases and the texture of the actual paint is very important for her. “I feel a great affinity with oil as a medium,†she says. She spends many months working on a painting, starting off with one colour and being led by the process of painting itself towards the finished work, often undergoing radical transformations on the way. “Often I think a painting will look a certain way or have a particular subject but in the end it changes completely. I suppose you could call it a very intuitive way of working.†The painting ‘The strength of her colours’ started as a portrait of children in a gigantic wave but metamorphosed into the present work devoid of all sea references.
This solo exhibition shows a new body of work, which marks a departure from her earlier paintings. The colours have become even more vivid and she has moved from solitary figures to paintings that concern themselves more with relationships. ‘Walking towards standing still’, for example, Alexandra sees equally as a painting of two different people or the journey of one becoming the other. She puts this change mainly down to motherhood, which has had a big impact on her work. There is a certain heart motif that keeps cropping up in her work and she also admits being influenced by her children’s drawings, again they are intuitive and draw what they feel rather than feeling the need to be representational.
Having moved to the Scottish Borders five years ago from New York, Alexandra feels very much at home in Scotland. She describes her new, bolder painting style as â€â€¦feeling more rooted in myself as well as in my new home, Scotland.â€
She has widely exhibited in the United States and Greece but this is her first exhibition in the UK. Her works are part of private collections in the United States, Greece and the UK.
You can also view her recent works on her website at www.howlin-owl.com.
