Indigenous Ephemera I
June 20, 2020
About three years ago, as I Sunday-drove down the Scenic Drive of Pass Christian, Mississippi, I commented to my dear friend (since seventh grade) that the live oaks "reach down into my soul". After living in Beverly Hills and being a California resident for the last twenty years, words can't express the impact of spending time with friends and family on the Gulf Coast where I spent my childhood. I just surrendered to the balmy breeze and was comforted by the recovery of the trees since the awful hurricane of 2005.
My Sunday drive companion is also an artist, so we chatted for a while about how to express what we are feeling in our souls when we see these little miracles of nature all around us. Although there may be casinos on the Coast (what people from here call it), and the internet has brought the world here, the Coast is still sweet little communities of interesting folks I love and miss when I'm in my "real" life in California. Everyone gets excited about simple things like creole tomato season, and for that I am so glad. Their joy is reminders of my childlike glee at the same types of simple things.
Indigenous Ephemera I is the first of my original artworks to be offered for sale. I have created twelve pieces with my hand drawn, cut and painted paper on canvas. In these pieces I have combined many aspects of my personal history into the aesthetic. I design the piece with super color saturated canvasses with ephemera of my childhood, running through a Southern yard in the summer.
I love to make art with my favorite dogs - I even wrote a book about our dog Louis XIV. This collection has begun with the first paintings of Luigi Mops Valentin Richard, our very bad very funny pug. See the Alexandra90210 Art Boutique for more dog art.
As much as I love creating the concepts for large artwork, it's the smaller pieces that give me a lot of joy. I usually derive all the images on artworks that are less than 12" square from the large pieces. In art we call these smalls, but that seems, well, SMALL, and these pack a big color and style punch, so I call them Petite Originals. I started doing everything under 12 inches square at my desk in Beverly Hills, and the large pieces are primed and painted in Bay Saint Louis in the summer time, where I have the ugliest studio, but there's a lot more space to mess up! I usually do pairs, so for designers these are a godsend when styling walls.
The Four C's
An ongoing collection which originated with Alexandra's love of ribbon candy and pretty candy dishes, which are also beloved vices of hers. Around the time these pieces were just a thought, Mississippi legalized marijuana, which is interesting to Alexandra after all these years of living in a cannabis friendly state. It's much easier to find cannabis leaves in California to emboss than in Mississippi, so calls were made and the genesis of the first C(annabis) piece was created in commemoration. In progress are the other three C's - candy with crystal and cocktails.
