Alexa Meade Breathes Life into her Artwork

With strokes of colors and the tricks of shadows, Alexa Meade works her own kind of magic with a paintbrush and creates new illusionary but real, real but illusionary worlds where the boundaries of our mundane dimensions are forever breached and blended. Painting over living, breathing individuals and making them part of her oeuvre, her artwork comes to life or rather life comes into her artwork.

A version of this exclusive interview first appeared in the pages of the 12th issue of ODDA Magazine.

An image from the artist’s Instagram promoting her Color of Reality live performance.

Q: What was the inspirational trigger to start painting on real people and objects?

A: I was really interested in shadows and the process of creating painted shadow representing a real shadow. Then, I got curious to see how it would look to paint shadows on people, and to paint all the gradients of light, so painting the highlights white, the middle tone grey, the shadows black… In doing that I realised that I could make someone look like a two dimensional painting, only by painting the lights on the form of their bodies. I don’t really have a background in art or painting, I studied political science, so my style wasn’t a result of first trying with painting on canvas but I have always directly experimented in the three dimensional space.

Q: As an artist, do you consider yourself a painter? Or is there something more and beyond that?

A: My work is a combination of different disciplines. There is painting, which is maybe one of the most tangible parts that is easy for people to see, but there is also an installation, because I create these three dimensional scenes, I arrange them and present them as alive. People can come in and interact with them. So, there is the installation component and there’s also performance as the subject is there, standing or sitting, living. I take pictures of the work, so it is also a photograph. Finally, I also produce videos. In the end, it is a combination of painting, installation, performance, photography and video work.

Q: With your art you turn 3D reality into two 2D and 2D into 3D, what is the end-goal behind it? Is it about breaking dimensions or integrating them?

A: It is about dealing with perspectives and also challenging dimensions. I have been collaborating with quantum physicists and they are interested in my artwork as it juxtaposes in between dimensions, it is like a super position of state, between 2D and 3D that could hold both of the spatial dimensions.

Q: What are the boundaries or limits of your art? If none, would you like to paint a whole city?

A: Oh I would love to paint a whole town, I am getting closer to paint things at the scale that I dream of. I just signed a lease on a new studio space where I will be able to paint the outside o the building and the street, and the building next to it, in addition to the inside of my studio. So that is really exciting to me.

Q: As the person painted is so key in your art, how do you choose your subjects?

A: True, often times when I see somebody and I just have a feeling about them, that they have something not standard by nature. Like someone who has a very long linear face or whose eyes might be very far apart. They can be beautiful in their own way, but it can’t be someone with a traditional look or a traditional beauty. I really try to find subjects with exaggerated features, because then when I paint them, I can play with the proportions and surprise the audience as they expect most faces to look a certain way. Often times, if I feel inspired on the spot and I just want to paint, I would call my friends and see if they are available to come to my studio right at that moment, otherwise I just encounter people in my normal life and I feel like “I HAVE to paint this person!”

Q: The series of art-works in the bathtub is quite impressive; can you tell us its meaning and inspiration?

A: That was a collaboration with Sheila Vand she is a performance artist. Sheila came up with the idea of having me paint her and having her in a bathtub filled of milk. It was really beautiful. I painted her body very precisely and then the moment she lay down in the milk, it completely changed and warped and I loosened my brush strokes around. It was fascinating to withdraw some of my control to this fluid milk and I had no idea of what it would happen.

The artist hard at work on one of her pantings.

Q: What is your view about integrating different forms of arts, as you actually did in your short movie “Color of Reality”? What is the addvalue in collaborating with other artists?

A: To some extent, the nature of my work defies classification. It is not traditional painting, it is not traditional photography…Thus, to add other artistic elements does not seem to be a dramatic deviation from the nature of my work, it was just another way to present it. When it comes to the short firm “Color of Reality”, written, directed and choreographed by John Boogz and produced by Animi.Design, featuring John Boogz and Lil Buck, who are movement artists. It was an extremely interesting way to bring together my style of work with these collaborators, because I make living paintings, people are the embodiment of the painting. They are alive, they are moving, so…why not have it be with these really talented movement artists who can bring it to life this way that seems beyond human. That aspect of bringing it to life through dance was really amazing and also using the work as a visual metaphor which is a story telling. I painted these two in every colour, there are blues, reds…and this is for me expressing how we have multiple pieces of us and they all come together as a whole. It is not just black and white, so the world.

Q: What was the most challenging project or installation you took on? More in general, what are the most difficult aspects in the making of your artworks?

A: A big part of my work involves painting shadows, highlights, reflections and most objects aren’t too reflective. But if I do want to paint curved glass, as you move around it the highlights and reflections change, so it is really hard to make it two dimensional from every possible angle, when from every angle it would look completely different. For instance, I have painted on a car a couple of times and the hardest part is capturing the feeling of the shininess of the car with highlights, because it is so dynamic, it has so many curves and there are so many areas where the light bounces off of it, when you look at it from different angles. To be able to capture that sense of shining of something so large is really a challenge.

Q: In an interview you stated that painting on the subjects is a way to reinterpret their essence from the artist’s view, but you then added that the paint is also a mask that overshadows the person underneath…don’t you find that the binomial essence-mask is itself contradictory? Where do you find the harmonisation of the two?

A: There is a tension between painting somebody’s essence and yet masking them at the same time. When I stare at a face, I look at not only the contours and lights, colours, shadows but also what I feel inside that person or the energy in the room or the space between us and how to translate that into colours and shadows. These are things that might not visually be there but that I can sense between us. In that way, it is pulling some of the person’s essence out and translating that directly on the top of them.

Federica Pantana

Federica Pantana is a lawyer, freelance writer and poet based in New York City. She has been writing poetry since the age of eight. Her first collection of poems (in Italian and English) is available on Amazon Kindle. Another collection of her most recent poetry is in the making. In the past few years, she has been contributing to ODDA Magazine and other fashion magazines. In light of her interest for fashion writing and photography, she is currently working on a fashion & art photography magazine that will be released in early 2018.