Diving Into Blue

Famous throughout his career for letting his California roots show, artist Peter Alexander is now fully immersed in his ‘blue period.’

‘Blue’ is the name of artist Peter Alexander’s monumental mural installed last year at Disney Hall. It’s also the color he has used exclusively in his art ever since. ‘Whatever questions are being asked of blue, it’s consuming them more than I imagined,’ says Alexander during a recent interview in his spacious light-filled studio in Santa Monica. ‘It keeps asking for more.’ Two new paintings, large-scale studies in blue, will cast their hypnotic, lustrous spell at Craig Krull Gallery when the exhibition ‘Dive’ opens this Saturday, September 9. Like the Disney mural, these new paintings are inspired by the Pacific Ocean, the artist’s lifelong muse. While the Disney mural is concerned with surface effects of sunlight dancing on the water, the recent paintings explore underwater depths in layer upon layer of thinned blue oil paint pooling and puddling on smooth sheets of highly polished aluminum. ‘It has the greatest range of dark to light, more than any color I’ve ever worked with,’ Alexander says of the deep blue oil paint he uses, called Phthalo. ‘It can go from almost black to this very brilliant luminescent light blue.’ Alexander recalls how two Californians who previewed the new work at his studio ‘got it immediately; there was no question what they’re about.’ However, to a dealer visiting from New York, ‘they didn’t mean squat,’ Alexander says with a laugh. Born in Los Angeles in 1939, the artist grew up in Newport Beach as the quintessential California kid. He left the state in 1957 to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied architecture, and spent his summers in Los Angeles working in the design offices of Richard Neutra. He transferred to the Architectural Association of London, then went on to study architecture first at UC Berkeley and later at USC. He switched gears and enrolled in the fine arts program at UCLA after a design project he was assigned by William Pereira’s office, one Alexander worked hard on for months and put everything into, was canceled for no apparent reason. ‘I realized I couldn’t spend that kind of time and energy and have it totally out of my control,’ Alexander explains. ‘Anyone who is a painter is doing it because they want control.’ Alexander’s art work is unabashedly connected to his home state, with its endless surf, sand and palm trees. But it is not all filled with sunshine. His now iconic night portraits of aerial views of Los Angeles show the city stripped of everything but the spectacle of its sparkling lights against a darkened ground. Another earlier series on black velvet also focused on capturing the extremes of light and dark’in this case, glittering creatures in the ocean’s depths. His fascination with light, especially how it makes things glitter and glow, can be traced to an event in his youth when he witnessed a spectacular meteor shower in the skies above Southern California. Alexander first gained recognition in the 1960s for his elegantly spare resin sculptures, works that have the appearance of frozen water. Pieces from this period, along with work by other artists associated with the Light and Space movement, were recently highlighted in the Norton Simon exhibition ‘Translucence: Southern California Art from the 1960s and 1970s.’ One of Alexander’s resin pieces also appeared last spring in Paris at the Pompidou’s ‘Los Angeles 1955-1985.’ An early pink and coral resin sculpture will appear in the new show as a counterpoint to all the ‘blueness.’ ‘It’s all the same thing,’ quips Alexander, raising his hands in a gesture that tells of a guy grown weary of the whole business of promoting his art. At the same time, he remains thoughtfully expressive about his work, and how it’s come full circle. ‘It’s about the sublime; that’s what the issue is,’ he says. ‘The biggest similarity between the resins and the new pieces is in their potential effect. It’s the same essential search or desire.’ Alexander first courted the color blue during a stint in 2001 at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, where he set up a temporary studio in one of bungalow suites. Although the artist lives close by in Santa Monica Canyon with his wife, Claudia Parducci, and their eight-year-old son (Alexander has two daughters in their late ’30s from a previous marriage), he was seeking a total immersion-type experience at the Miramar similar to one he had just returned from in Laguna Beach. ‘There were no phone calls and no interruptions,’ he says of the adventure living in a friend’s garage in Laguna Beach, where a rooftop perch allowed a perfect view of the coastline. ‘I made a whole slew of little paintings in two weeks because you get up and that [painting] is all you’re focused on. It was thrilling.’ His three-month residency at the Miramar culminated in a one-night exhibition at the hotel followed by a longer showing at the Craig Krull Gallery. Plenty of atmospheric stimuli’from the hotel’s lush courtyard, to dramatic sunsets and the mesmerizing lights of Ocean Avenue and the nearby Santa Monica Pier’surrounded Alexander. Ultimately it was the pool and its constantly shifting and shimmering surface that drew his attention most, inspiring a series of large paintings that capture the depth and seductive aqua glow of a swimming pool. Though his career as an artist continues to bring Alexander recognition and acclaim, his days spent as a youth on California beaches are never far from mind. ‘I was a County lifeguard in Hermosa Beach,’ Alexander says with a gleam in his eye. ‘It was the best job I ever had.’ A reception for Alexander will be held at the gallery from 4 to 6 p.m. this Saturday, September 9. The exhibition continues through October 14. Craig Krull Gallery is located at Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building B3, in Santa Monica. Contact: 828-6410