Contoy 1988

Peter Alexander's 'Contoy' sees chalk pastel and watercolor mingling on paper. Can you imagine him, picking up that brick-colored pastel, and dragging it across the page? First, it's like whispers of pigment are laid down, and then a storm of it. There's this crazy tension between the cool blue washes and those fiery marks, a kind of push and pull. Maybe he was thinking of the sky at dawn, that moment when everything is about to burst with light, and all those layers of pigment, that’s time piling up. Alexander’s work always reminds me of other west coast painters like Ed Ruscha, who’s always looking at light and space with California cool. All of us painters, we’re just talking to each other across decades, riffing on the same ideas. It's a never-ending conversation. Anyway, that single drag of pigment across a surface – that's where painting really lives: it's this act of searching, feeling, and trying to make sense of the world, one mark at a time.