The Middle Place

David T. Alexander, William’s Oeuvre Flows Through, acrylic on canvas, 77” x 78”

“Two elements are needed to form a truth—a fact and an abstraction.”—Remy de Gourmont

David T. Alexander gracefully commingles abstraction and realism to form an illustrious truth. His paintings are exhilarating expressions of escalated color of tumultuous landscapes. He sees the natural world as alive and in constant motion.

Alexander’s signature landscapes (Dry Series) and waterscapes (Wet Series) represent his significant 50-year history of painting and drawing with a bold palette and vitally gestural application. The Wet Series explores water as form by combining luminous colors with flattened, uncanny perspectives. Reflective pools, elusive ripples, and subtle shifts of light and glare are punctuated by tall, vertical reeds that culminate in richly painted surfaces oscillating between pure abstraction and recognizable natural forms.

In his Dry Series, Alexander continues his interest in evoking dramatic horizon lines, textured craggy terrain, and cliff faces with a

David T. Alexander, Japanese Rain, Shinjuku, Gyoen, acrylic on canvas, 58” x 52”

loose yet decisive painterly hand. Brazen brushwork and localized color create shifting moments that recall the artist’s experience of living in the varied, rugged landscapes of Canada, Iceland, and the United States.

David T. Alexander studied at the Vancouver Art School and at Langara College before graduating with a BFA from Notre Dame University in Nelson, British Columbia. In 1980 he moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to earn his master’s degree while researching in New York, London, and Paris. In 2006, Alexander was a special guest artist-in-residence at the Morris Graves Foundation, in California. He was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2018.

The Middle PlaceChristopher Benson

Christopher Benson in his studio Photo courtesy of the artist

I’ve never quite accepted the idea, which has dominated American art throughout my 45-year career, that art must be new in order to be meaningful. Though we often mistakenly conflate the two, there’s a subtle difference between originality and innovation. Endlessly rehashing old ideas or styles may be a dead end, but I’m less interested in breaking new ground for its own sake than in reinterpreting this ancient tradition of painting in some way that’s original to me, and that also reflects the depth and nuance of its long historical identity. The English abstractionist Howard Hodgkin once said: “the past is the only home we have.” I agree, to some extent, but I also think that the past is comprehensible only in relation to the present moment in which we find ourselves. The problem, then, is not how art can be new, but how it can be original within both the long context of history and the present.

Christopher Benson, Three Cheers for the Red White and Blue, oil on linen, 60” x 48”