Lot 273
William Alexander
American, (20th/21st century)
Madman Series, abstract portrait, 1994
oil on board
Signature and artist label verso.
2006 Art Review from OakPark.com: William Alexander is a 36-year resident of Oak Park and has long maintained a strong presence in the local art community. He exhibits with the Oak Park Art League, with whom he has a life membership, and has also had shows at Oak Park Village Hall. He founded the Harrison Street Art Co-op, which graced the corner of Harrison and Lombard, across from the Buzz Caf for many years before its 2003 closing. Nevertheless, his involvement with the Harrison Street arts community has continued unabated with on-going exhibits at Art Gecko.
Influenced by his experience as a victim of bi-polar disorder, Alexander's art explores the dark, the wild, the uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, aspects of human nature. This comes through in his abstract works in which there is no object or central mass present to give the viewer a sense of stability. There are only colors, generally associated with emotions, and lines, presumably motion lines, which suggest fast and uncontrolled movement. Here and there, the lines crash in splatters of wild paint.
The abstracts, a study of color and motion, overly full and active, have a very different feeling tone from the sense of emptiness characterizing his skull series. Some of the skulls pop out stark white from backgrounds of red and black, giving them a strange intensity, at odds with the emptiness of the eye sockets. In one skull painting, four skulls, like the four seasons, suggest the passage of time. A softer work, whites and shades of light blue seem to be gently falling around the skulls, like leaves in the fall. The picture suggests a melancholy that won't go away.
Alexander's madman series, of particular importance in his development as an artist, can be viewed aesthetically and thematically as a combination of his abstracts and his skull series. The faces have the same shape, the hollow-cheeked look of the skulls, overlayed with the wild colors and fast motion lines of the abstract series, suggesting a hollow emotional state underneath the wild fluctuations associated with bi-polar disorder. In stark contrast, the eyes of the figures in the madman series are wide-eyed, staring straight ahead, eyeballs popping, as if desperately searching for an escape from the chaos of the mind.
- Dimensions: 17 1/2"H x 18"W
- Medium: oil on board
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