Since his last exhibition Alex has extended and developed the themes for which he is best known – the British countryside and his beloved Anglesey. With his customary simplicity and poetic observations Alex has found a new confidence in his work, enjoying the manipulation of paint, exploring new techniques and harnessing all their possibilities to his painterly ambition.
This exhibition treats us to an extended range of subject matter. Poetic vistas of Anglesey, Snowdonia and the Menai Straits - from wide canvasses doing justice to the vast horizons and panoramas of his homeland on to intimate and gentle undulating landscapes of Wiltshire where he now lives. We have fictional dreamscapes of imaginary cities and expressive and illusory scenes of Venice. Alex explores and plays with paint delighting in the beauty of the image and the mark making.
Beguiling simplicity and spontaneity sums up the work in this exhibition, achieved through a developing confidence in his craft. Alex has been on an artistic journey these last two years in which he continues to build up his connections with his landscapes, relishing in the mysterious elements of the story and the process of illusion. He says “ Painting is a process of illusion – the illusion that paint is a real image, a beautiful image, but ultimately it is still paint. I want to see that”.
"Some artists still seem to find it exciting to endlessly question the nature of what art is. I don’t particularly.
Maybe because I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth - into an aristocratic family, growing up at the Anglesey Stately Home, Plas Newydd and recently inheriting the title, Marquess of Anglesey - maybe because of the lucky privilege of being securely attached to a place and a history, I haven’t been driven to carve out a niche of (probably spurious) originality.
For me, it’s far more interesting to search for a fresh personal response to what I see around me - including the beautiful landscape of Anglesey and Snowdonia - using, mainly, very traditional means.
As Patrick Heron said, speaking of Matisse’s painting: Oil paint on white primed canvas: there was never any other means available to the hand of man to match it. It is so incredibly subtle in its possibilities.
And the challenge is always to marry the illusion of depth, representing the subject observed out there in the world (light, sky, water, mountains, woods, etc), with the abstract physical reality of the paint on the flat picture surface. To create an experience that contains both these aspects of painting." - Alex Uxbridge