Who is David T. Alexander?

David T. Alexander RCA (born January 13, 1947) is a Canadian painter, known for breathing new life into the landscape tradition of Canada as well as for in force in a terrible and ambitious aerate to reinvigorate the contemporary practice of landscape painting.

Alexander’s mommy and grandmother were painters and his mother, by chance, befriended the niece of Emily Carr’s friend Ira Dilworth, bringing the painter and her assume into Alexander’s world at an in advance date. He began painting seriously in 1966 in Steveston High School due to the sponsorship of a tough but approving art teacher, Mrs Stavrakoff. He attended the Vancouver School of Art and Design (today’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design), Langara College (1967-1970), and Vancouver Community College (1971-1972), then attended art moot in Nelson, British Columbia, at the Kootenay School of the Arts (then affiliated past the now defunct Notre Dame University) for a BFA, graduating in 1978.

In 1979, he attended one of the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops with Friedel Dzubas and John Elderfield, and because of the determined experience he had in the workshop moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1980. He continued to attend artists` workshops at Emma Lake, such as those truth by Tim Scott (1984), and Maryann Harmon (1985). In 1985, he established an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan and completed the thesis component of his degree upon the be in of Claude Monet. (Critics would cutting edge link his sham to that of Monet and in his well along painting, Alexander would sometimes use subjects that are partnered to Monet, especially to Monet`s late work.) In 2003, he and his relatives moved to the Okanagan Valley, BC, near Kelowna, BC where he has his house and studio. In 2011, he himself was the workshop leader at Emma Lake.

Alexander draws inspiration for his bill from the unique feel of the land which he archives in sketchbooks and sketches in preparation for more done canvases. As a result, he has traveled extensively fake research for his work, including making trips to England, France, and the United States during his graduate research, and past then, travelling to the Arctic (1988), Scotland (to which he has subsequent to several times), Iceland (1996, 2002), New Mexico and Arizona (1996), Nevada (2005), California (several visits as well), as competently as making many trips to northern Ontario and Quebec, but he always combines his canonic subject matter (places without a great deal of human footprint) with abstraction. In 2004, the Globe and Mail wrote that he was an artist who could “simultaneously make convincing the reality of the scene back him…and make manifest, at the thesame time, the extremely abstract dazzle of the visual assistance that makes occurring what we see”. His painting has a “two-way grip”, said the newspaper.

In his action of the 1980s, Alexander painted the prairie landscape, with its flat expanses and big skies, as well as developing a thicker, more emphatic exaggeration of applying paint. During the 1990s, he sought to convey the structure and shapes of the forms that compose the mountains, varying his practice to Make rectangles of either vertical or horizontal orientation interspersed taking into account near-square paintings as with ease as panoramic-format paintings. For imagery, he sometimes used an invented juxtaposition: a big flower successful in tummy of an Arctic landscape. Beginning in 2004 (after an initial inspiration in 2001), Alexander began to focus on water surfaces and their fleeting colour and blithe effects in his paintings.

His do something has been exhibited in galleries across Canada and in the United States and Europe. In 2012, the exhibition David Alexander: The Shape of Place, curated by Liz Wylie for the Kelowna Art Gallery, went upon a national tour. It opened in imitation of a major multi-author tape published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. The show, a retrospective, combined large and little paintings in the reveal of works on paper and Alexander`s sketches in sketchbooks.

His works are represented in collections such the Canada Council Art Bank (Ottawa), Canadian Embassies (Warsaw and Beijing), Concordia University (Montreal), Department of Foreign Affairs (Kuala Lumpur and Berlin), Edmonton Art Gallery, Institute of Art (Iceland), MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina), Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon), Museum London, Ontario; Saskatchewan Arts Board, University of Toronto, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Alexander has worked as an art scholastic and has been a visiting player at schools and galleries across Canada and internationally, including the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick; the Iceland Academy of Fine Arts in Reykjavik; Portland College in Portland, Oregon; and Morris Graves Foundation in California, among others. He was elected a zealot of the Royal Canadian Academy. Alexander was featured in an episode of the Gemini Award-winning television series Landscape As Muse (2008).