Rebecca Alex
Painter
Oil Painting
“When I paint, I’m looking intensely at what’s before me — not only as an artist, trying to see color, light, and form, but as a scientist, trying to understand the underlying structure of the figure, flower, or scene before me.”
Some of Rebecca’s most precious memories are ditching high school to go art museums with her mom. After studying English Literature at Colby College, Maine and The University of Wales in Swansea, Wales, she interned for a summer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Returning to LA to work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she led an effort to catalogue the entire collection for the first time in its forty-year history.
A Mark Rothko exhibition at LACMA changed the course of her life. Learning more about his life, she was inspired by the deep places his art and his life had taken him. She headed to New York City to study at both the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design for six years. Her teachers were the great figurative masters, Robert Beverly Hale (“Drawing Lessons of the Great Masters”), Ted Seth Jacobs and Ron Sherr.
After living and painting landscapes in Switzerland and Yosemite Valley for three years, she moved to Santa Cruz, California, started a family, earned an M.F.A., and taught children’s art classes and college studio art for 28 years. Now retired to Guerneville, she is painting full-time and loving every minute.
Artist website: https://www.rebeccajalex.com/about.html
Process:
Rebecca works in the traditional “en plein air”, or “in the open air” style of landscape painting. First developed by the Impressionists, plein air seeks to capture the changing weather and light conditions of landscape painting, as opposed to an older style of academic landscape painting done in the studio from outdoor sketches. These academic scenes were dark, with somber colors, reflecting indoor lighting conditions of the studio, as well as the academic reliance on detailed drawing and value contrasts to make a painting work.
Rebecca finds that painting in situ helps her to understand a scene not only visually, but with all her other senses as well. She can feel the wind, smell the sea, taste the air and hear the sounds of the land all around her. It is an exciting practice that she finds lends life and vitality to her work.
