Alex McIntyre

Alex’s paintings are poetic, process led responses to landscape. They come from a deep love of the world, and a sense of awe and wonder.  She hopes they will remind you of places you have known or would like to know. Using remembered and translated experiences, source drawings and photographs, she describes embodied encounters with light, sky, journeys and the changing season.  She is interested in the 3dimensionality of a painting, carving into and raising the surface through processes of construction, destruction and material play.  Her paintings evolve through an intuitive and physical interaction with materials.

Alex’s process of a painting has several stages. She begins by walking, running, drawing and taking ‘fast photographs’ outside. This is a way of feeling the landscape at a cellular, and sensory level.  In the studio she has prepared birch or poplar panels with layers of a traditional gesso ground.  Alex then creates texture with a brush and palette knife or by sanding and carving back into the gesso.  Thinking about the 3 dimensionality of the picture plane, she begins by using a high-quality light fast acrylic ink to reveal the textured surface and add base colour. She builds on this colour ground by adding, and removing, layers of acrylic mixed media.   The painting gradually evolves through an intuitive and physical interaction with the materials. Alex aims for a sense of balance or charge between saturated areas of colour patina and stripped back areas without paint. She says, “I know they are finished when I feel a sense of “lining up”, when the painting and I have both said enough. Often, this is when the painting tells me its name.”

Alex has exhibited in the UK, United States and Romania. She has work in commercial and private collections in the United States, Japan, Norway, Germany, France, Holland and across the UK. She completed a five-year artist fellowship at Digswell Arts in 2016 and has held AIR positions with Middlesex University, Brent Museum and Archives, English National Ballet, Wizard Presents Production Company and Watford Museum.