Alexa Meade: Will You Be My Canvas?

Artist Alexa Meade paints on living subjects, everyday objects, anything that inspires her to paint, and what have you. She creates an unusual blend of painting and photography, challenging the conventional manoeuvres of art.

Van Gogh made portraits of people, sketching their sentiments on paper. Los Angeles-based Alexa Meade sketches her sentiments on people. The 27-year-old artist takes a classical concept, trompe l’oeil, the art of making a twodimensional representation look three-dimensional, and works in an opposite direction. That is, instead of painting her subjects, she paints illusionistic portraits directly on living subjects, challenging familiar visual subjects with her own perspective. Her walking, talking optical illusions, 3D paintings that confuse how the eye processes objects in space have garnered a lot of curiosity. The result: An uncanny portrait. Creating a whole new genre of art, Alexa’s portraits originated from an enduring fascination with the illusions prevalent in representational media. “Rather than painting my subjects to blend into a background or turn them into something they’re not, I amplify what they already are, but to the extent that they become transformed into something else altogether,” she says. Alexa lets us into her surreal world.

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Life As She Knew It

Growing up in Washington DC, Alexa’s life was just like any other kid’s. She was passionate about art. But when it came to choosing a career, she was told she needed to consider options for a ‘real’ job and not that of an artist. The difference between her and an ordinary person is that she decided to change the ending. Majoring in Political Science, Alexa wrote her thesis on the Obama Campaign, where she served as a political staffer in 2008. Working on the side of the campaign that dealt with spin (which implies using disingenuous or highly manipulative tactics to persuade public opinion in favour of the candidate) and PR, she became really fascinated by how one interprets information and the mismatch between what is said and what is heard. But when she graduated from college in 2009, Alexa realised art was more than just a passion for her. “I knew it was meant to be my life and the moment I realised that I stepped away from politics,” Alexa recalls.

Chasing Her Dream

Not interested in going down the beaten path by sketching and stretching her canvas, Alexa used her interest in spin rather astutely to create her own brand of art. The experience she gained as the political staffer on the campaign prompted her to explore the different ways visual perception can be manipulated. “I had no formal training in art, except when I was 16 and I took a painting class at summer camp. That was the last time I painted on a canvas,” she reveals. “While in college I got an idea for an art project, and I really wanted to figure out how to make it work. It was during that time that I decided to really pick up painting and hone my craft.”

The Technique

It was back in 2008 when Alexa first thought of using the trompe l’oeil technique in a different manner. She had an idea for a project wherein she wanted to put black paint on the ground where the shadows would fall. The idea later evolved in several directions from painting the gradient of light in grey scale to then painting in a full spectrum of colour on top of people in 2009. Challenging the perceptual boundaries between 2D and 3D, Alexa applies thick slabs of paint straight onto objects or people. With nifty, coarse strokes, Alexa covers and changes the facial expressions and clothes of her subject until, bit by bit, her three-dimensional template becomes a two-dimensional picture. As the pigment only stays in place for a few hours, the artist preserves her work through photography. The effect is quite uncanny as background, foreground and subject seem to be compressed into one continuous space, absent of depth. How much time does it take to make the 3D image appear 2D, we ask her. “The time it takes to paint a model varies depending on what style I’m going for,” Alexa explains. “If I want to make a portrait with bold, gestural brushstrokes, I try not to go back in to rework my initial strokes. I have to trust that my first instinct was the correct one. If I’m only doing one pass through with paint, I can paint a face in under an hour.” Alexa doesn’t draft sketches for her 3D paintings on 2D canvas. When she conceptualises a new composition, she likes to think about the subject matter as a complete space rather than the static image. “If I want to make a carefully rendered naturalistic portrait that has a strong resemblance to the sitter, I have to be very deliberate with my brushstrokes. When I go back in to touch up, I have to be really careful with my decisions and it can easily take five minutes to concentrate deeply before I put down each new stroke. Such portraits can take three hours on the face alone. I always paint the clothes and background before the day of the portrait sitting, because that portion can take me up to 20 hours to complete,” she adds. Alexa says that through her art she likes to portray how one can nuance one’s personal presentation to take on guise of different personas. “It’s through the face that others know us, and to a certain extent how we know ourselves,” she says. “When I paint a portrait on top of someone’s face, I physically change the way they are seen and, in turn, the way they are perceived. The subject is still present, just hidden under a mask. There is this collision between substance and style, reality and the representation thereof.”

Making It Big

“Earlier, I used to have to beg friends and family to model for me, but I no longer have a problem finding people who are willing to sit still for a few hours and get covered in paint,” she laughs. Though Alexa is well known at places like the Saatchi Gallery in London, people still find it difficult to figure out her art. “I try to show pictures to illustrate the point, but it’s not until they see videos that they understand what it is I’m doing,” she says. Alexa recalls an interesting anecdote from one of her illustrations: “I’d brought a painted man onto the subway for the artwork titled Transit, and people on the train didn’t know how to react to the living painting.” Alexa recently collaborated with performance artist Sheila Vand for a project, Milk: What Will You Make of Me?. The project explores a range of ideas, many of them unrelated to painting, photography and portraiture. “Sheila and I looped back to my main body of work and came up with an interesting twist,” she explains. “What if, instead of static elements in the portrait, everything was in flux and constantly evolving? We liked the idea of using milk, as the opaque liquid lends well itself to disembodying and re-shaping the human form.” She has also worked on a special project with Australian singer Gotye. Talking about the collaboration, Alexa says, “Gotye had me come down to Australia to create art with him in his barn, where he wrote his hit number Somebody That I Used To Know. Over the course of a week, we worked on creative projects ranging from collage and photography to painting. I’ve also accompanied him on parts of his world tour. Our joint artwork is under wraps for now.”

From the November 2013 issue of L’Officiel India.