Be sure to join us to celebrate his works on August 23, 7-9pm.
Alex L. Porter’s art depicts landscape elements as icons of all life in order to address the profound experience that the spectacle of nature provides. Rather than presenting the landscape purely as scenery, his images point to our common involvement with these features. The environment that becomes a pastoral backdrop to human life is, itself, undergoing the brutal ritual of living and dying. Seeing and representing this ritual in nature is pertinent to understanding the struggle we all undergo.
The subject of most of the pieces is simply, growth. It emerges from a bleak but fertile void until it becomes an overwhelming force. The process used to create each piece also relates directly to this idea. These drawings are built slowly and delicately, but depict the raw, chaotic elements that command the form of the natural world. Portrayed flatly as black ink silhouettes, but in focused detail, branches and trunks emerge from the lines. No shorthand brushwork or painterly illusion is employed. Every mark is equally attended to on the paper, allowing the viewers’ eye to find or create emphasis as they view the piece.
This style emerged slowly from more traditional landscape drawings and paintings done in a variety of media. This current approach he developed primarily in the interest of ritual over illusion. His images are about forms, about a language of lines rather than a play of light.
Alex is a D.C. area local, and has practiced in drawing and painting from a very young age. His work has always benefited from the combination of a family-life that found him frequently outdoors, and the inspiration of many great art instructors. Alex spent years developing skill in both oil and acrylic painting, but was focused increasingly on watercolor landscapes. After graduating from the Corcoran College of Art + Design he continued in this style of landscape illustration to develop his current body of work.
