Alexandra Tyng: An Artist’s Journey
Recently, when interviewing Alexandra Tyng for this article, she said to me, “I enjoy the challenges of being an artist.” Her comment was not meant in a negative connotation, but rather in the context of the artistic journey.
As a child, Tying’s favorite pastime was drawing. She would fill books and paper with drawings. Sometimes her father would draw with her, and her favorite subjects were people and houses—both inside and outside—often in combination. Most of the good realistic art she saw was illustration and color plates in art books. By the time Tyng was in high school, she was a regular visitor to the American wing in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Tyng always answered, “an artist,” thinking to herself, isn’t it obvious?
But finding formal art training in the 1970s was challenging. Abstract and conceptual art had taken over a majority of university art schools. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts taught some traditional skills and theory, but did not offer an academic degree. This was way before she had the opportunity to ask a question on social media like, “What colleges offer both art training in traditional methods and a solid academic program?” She had to rely on the advice of college guidance counselors. Tyng decided to attend Harvard and majored in art history, which turned out to be a good decision.
Art history students could take a limited number of studio art classes, so she took a drawing class taught by William Reimann that was challenging and fun. In addition, students were required to go to the Fogg and Boston museums to see the original art when writing papers; she ended up spending hours looking at paintings by Sargent, Beaux, Copley, Homer, Hopper, Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. Other artists like Judith Leyster and Artemisia Gentileschi she came to know and love through her 17th-century Dutch painting professor, who showed them art that was not included in the textbooks. Getting to know other representational painters, and becoming familiar with their working methods and thought processes, have all been important sources of knowledge for the artist. But it was the growth and reach of the internet that provided additional opportunities. Tyng says, “The internet created an explosion of the learning curve for me, along with many more personal and professional connections with artists. After all the years I had spent trying so hard to learn skills on my own, suddenly I was bombarded with information and the missing pieces clicked into place.”
Her growth as an artist is evident in one of her recent works, Point of Turning, an oil painting with a compelling composition and expertly handled values and color. The inspiration for this painting came about over time and involved the merging of two ideas, a painting of her brother and one of his mother in her kitchen cooking. After creating a single drawing featuring these two ideas, she was intrigued by the dynamic of the eye contact between the mother and son. Tyng says, “The composition shows a middle-aged man looking intently at his aging mother and realizing that he now has to start taking care of her, and a mother returning his gaze with love and defiance as she takes care of him as usual by preparing dinner. I felt the way they were looking at each other represented the complex range of emotions that I had often seen in their faces—and in the faces of other older parents and grown children in similar situations.”
As Tyng continues her artistic journey, she finds one of the most challenging things about being a self-employed painter is balancing commissioned work and the kind of personally motivated work that ends up in galleries and museums. There are income fluctuations and changes in the art market that make for a life of unpredictability, but she sees those challenges as opportunities.
1