Beautiful and surreal
SCAVENGED ITEMS DOMINATE RICHARD ALEXANDER’S STILL LIFES
The top-prize winner in the Ridgefield Guild of Artists annual juried show is a still life of a weathervane clamped in a workshop vise painted in oil by an artist named Richard Alexander.
The juror who chose it, Cybele Maylone, the executive director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, writes that she found Alexander’s painting “exquisitely rendered, but not quite what meets the eye. The depiction of the weather vane plays with scale and site, and draws the viewer into an image that is both beautiful and surreal.”
The weather vane looms large against a gray sky. Grounded only by the vise, it seems arrested in flight. A question mark on the directional arrow at the very top points to the painting’s title, “Which Way from Here.”
Alexander happens to be a retired New York City firefighter. He says he learned of his Ridgefield prize at the end of what always is a trying day, Sept. 10, the eve of the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He had just gotten home from setting up chairs at the 9/11 memorial monument, one that he designed, in his hometown, Mount Kisco, N.Y.
“The phone rang and I was like, ‘Who’s calling me now?’ It was this fellow Chris [Perry] from the Ridgefield Guild and he said, ‘Congratulations on getting into the show and congratulations on winning the show.’ It blew my mind,” Alexander says.
“I said, ‘Chris, this is unbelievable. This is like the day I got promoted to lieutenant,’” then whiplashed from joy to sorrow, told him, “This is like one of the worst days of the year. I was a fireman. I worked at the World Trade Center Recovery site for a month.”
Perry, a well-known book artist who is the Guild’s exhibitions director, said he understood, having once lived in lower Manhattan. “I never had a 9/11 like that,” Alexander says, back in the joyful present. “I was on cloud nine.”
Alexander has many ties to Connecticut. In recent summers, he’s rented at Fairfield Beach. Earlier, there were family trips to boats moored in harbors in Greenwich’s Cos Cob section and Norwalk — the subject of some of his seascape paintings. He also makes excursions to the Weir Farm National Historical Park in Wilton to paint en plein air.
He doesn’t think his background as a firefighter makes him much different from other artists who had earlier careers. But unlike many of them, Alexander, who is 60, didn’t study art in college. His degree was in drafting from SUNY Canton and as a young man he owned a sign painting business. His formal art training began about a decade ago, after his retirement from the fire department and while he was working on the Mount Kisco 9/11 memorial.
A member of the memorial committee introduced him to Alan Reingold, a noted illustrator known for his presidential portraits, who invited him to take classes. Alexander says he balked, but finally stopped in and copied a picture on command.
When Reingold saw the drawing, Alexander says, “He put his hand on my back and said, ‘You’re one of us. You need to come here every Thursday night.’ That was my motivation.”
Soon, he found the same sense of community with artists he had felt in the fire department. One instructor led to another until he eventually was studying with the landscape painter John Osborne at the Ridgewood Art Institute in New Jersey, renowned for championing art that strives for realism and beauty. Alexander still regularly returns there to paint.
His website portfolio now includes seascapes and landscapes, also done in oil, but still lifes dominate. While all appear “exquisitely rendered,” as Maylone noted, many are traditional table-top studies of flowers or fruits. Others, however, like the Ridgefield prize-winner, are arrangements of objects Alexander scavenges from antique stores and garage sales.
“I keep my eye out for things I think will make interesting compositions,” he says. “I put that weathervane in that vise on an old oil crate. Obviously, I added the question mark, asking which way society is going from here.”
A second painting he has in the Ridgefield show is of a battered parking meter wrapped in a faded American flag. It also has a title, “Times Running,” open to interpretation. Alexander says it is a comment on the current political climate. “We gotta make a move,” he says. “Either unite or come up with another plan.”
Many of his compositions have Americana elements: antique toy trucks and cars carrying baseballs or baseball gloves. Faithfully rendered in oil, they combine timeless dignity with modern playfulness. A masterful banana fills the bed of an orange state highway pick up truck. A red chili pepper hangs from the end of a fire truck’s yellow ladder.
The American flag appears again and again in his paintings. There’s one behind the model of an old warship, a Spanish galleon he says, that belonged to his grandfather who worked as a caretaker on a Bedford estate. Alexander remembers being fascinated with it as a child. A pewter mug placed before the ship is a traditional still-life element. The painting was shown in a juried show at the Salmagundi Club in New York City, one of the nation’s oldest art societies.
Even more personal is the still life where the American flag is displayed at full width tacked to a wooden wall, painted with trompe l’oeil precision. Alexander says the wood is an old piece of barn siding. Below the flag, on a shelf he built himself, he has arranged objects that he says tell the story of his life. It reads from left to right, beginning with a fishing rod and ending with a bouquet of paint brushes in a bottle.
“As a kid it was fishing,” he says. “then I got into sports. Then I got into a kind of crazy 8-ball period. Then I became a volunteer fireman. And then I got smart, so those are the books. Then I became a New York City firefighter. I studied and became a lieutenant. And at the end of the shelf is where I’m at and where I’ll probably stay for the rest of my life. And that’s painting.”
He considers the biographical painting one of his “good” ones. He says it won an award at a Ridgewood Art Institute exhibit. He recalls titling it, “My American Dream.”