Via Issue 203, Foragers
Written by Tara Anne Dalbow
Alexander inherited his love of nature from his father. Born in the 19th century, he was a Waldenesque figure who could decipher the calls of whippoorwills from those of quails and great horned owls, could identify every willow, toad, and blooming bush the two of them encountered. Time spent camping and fishing with his father in the bayous taught Alexander how to sit with the natural world, to not only look, but to see. It’s also what made him conscious of the indelible loss that accompanies change from a very young age. Driving back from excursions in East Texas, his father would point to the gas stations that now covered over creekbeds, the fast food chains that took the places of post oak groves. To this day, Alexander’s work can be read as a bid against the erasure that accompanies progress.
Given his upbringing, it’s perhaps unsurprising that when the young artist moved to Soho in the 1970s, the shocking absence of nature manifested in a change to his practice. “I’d always been a painter of observation,” he said. “Then suddenly there was this explosion of angst: apocalyptic, almost Boschian scenes with demons and flames.” It wasn’t until he found a place in Amagansett on the east end of Long Island, where he had a sprawling garden and a pond, that he returned to painting the world that he loved. If there are historically two kinds of landscape painters, those that depict nature from a distance as if seen through a window pane, and those that show nature from the point of view of someone immersed within it, Alexander is squarely in the second camp. “I have to have my hands in the earth,” he says.
Fittingly, the majority of the works in his fourth exhibition with Berggruen Gallery were painted in part or in full en plein air. Propping his easel beside his waterlily-filled pond, amid his rose garden and the plots of tomatoes and peppers, or elsewhere on the three-acre property, he documents in oil, charcoal, and ink, the beautiful, frenzied, fertile world around him. Expressive, exacting gestures and lush, lambent colors capture the majestic otherness of an ibis perched on a bare branch as in “Scarlet Ibis with Approaching Storm” (2025) and the burnished glow of coral roses against a darkening sky as in “Garden Secrets” (2025). He describes his process in terms of refinement: subtracting as much as he adds. Comparing the composition of an image to that of a symphony, he explains, “you have kettle drums, bass fiddles, piccolos, French horns. If it all works together, you have music. If it doesn’t, you have noise.”
The balance and the beauty are not uncomplicated. His sensitivity to the precarity of his subjects, in particular, and the natural world in total, lends the canvases their emotional weight. They are, he says, “a glimpse of paradise before the wrecking ball hits.” Stormy skies and dead and dying trees engender a feeling of foreboding, a growing unease. In “Searching for Something” (2025), three great blue herons stare out from their place among a cluster of bare, broken branches, each bird imbued with its own distinct interiority. “I always want the viewer to feel that the painting is looking back at them,” he says. Meeting the unblinking, yellow-eyed gaze of the creature in the center, I can confirm that they do.
In his 80s, Alexander continues to paint with the urgency of someone who knows all too well what we—all of us—stand to lose.
