We've all seen paintings where "the eyes follow you around the room", but when was the last time you saw them get up and walk off? I remember an old Hammer House of Horror episode in the 1970s where two agents offered a tramp (or hobo for the Americans, I'm not talking about a woman with loose morals here), with a tattoo on his back drawn by a famous tattooist. The first offers a highly complicated series of skin graft operations and ten grand for his trouble, the second offers a job for life parading around a gallery, and essentially a job for life on far more money. He takes the first option, and ends up dead in an alley, after the art dealer has him killed and skinned. Moral of the story, if an offer sounds too good to be true, it is. Still, there is a more humane option, one that Alexa Meade has become rather famous for doing, and that's painting people. I'm not talking about traditional figurative painting here, I mean literally applying the paint to the skin of a volunteer and taking photos of the result.
Alexa Meade, an installation artist based in the Washington D.C, creatively uses the human body as a canvas, she works with acrylic paints, first applying a white matt emulsion tinted with yellow or brown as a base coat, before literally painting her subject's portrait on the skin of the subject. The results are rather astounding, it's an exciting take on traditional painting, studying the human form in its ultimate living form. For those who think that the time of traditional painting is dead, let me reassure you, Alexa Meade's portfolio is definitely alive, walking, talking, eating, working, sleeping, the lot.
Her background in political communications has inspired her intellectual fascination in the vast gulf between perception and reality. We in Britain are only too painfully aware of that fact, just look at the shambles of an election we've just been through. People turned away from the voting booth, a hung parliament, and I didn't even receive my postal vote, the local council half-heartedly accused me of electoral fraud when I asked for another. That's the gap between perception and reality. At least politically. At least in this house anyway.
Alexa Meade backs up her innovative angle on portraiture with some hard and fast skills, she's obviously well practised in paint, her works looking more like oils than acrylics. Her use of paint in the third dimension has lead her to create using the "canvases" of found objects, live models, and architectural spaces, all of which are incorporated into her installations which enhance her argument for a perceptual shift in how we experience the hyperreal and hype versus the hard and fast reality of life.
Have a gander at these and see what I'm harping on about:
Timmy on The Metro
Ann
Self Portrait
Take a look at the process…
Jaimie's Portrait
Natura Morta
Do check out this fascinating artist's website at www.AlexaMeade.com and Alexa's flickr page. She offers up limited edition prints on archival paper and commissions, email her at for more details.
