Translating Memories With a Light Touch

A young boy sits with his family on the sand as a shower of meteors dazzles the night sky and sparkles the blackened sea over Newport Beach. “It was an indelible impression, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen,” Peter Alexander recalls. “And I am sure that when you experience things like that when you are young, you’ve been branded somehow.”

The gray-haired Alexander, now 60, believes such recollections are channeled indirectly into his sculptures, pastels, paintings and tapestries. Sumptuous sunsets, celestial glitter, moon glow, neon signs and street lamps--Alexander looks to the seductive properties of light, natural or artificial, as the subject of his art. From his earliest forays as a member of L.A.’s so-called Light and Space movement, to his more recent paintings of flood-lit Las Vegas statuary, Alexander is consistent within his diversity. The first survey of his work, “Peter Alexander: In This Light,” opens at the Orange County Museum of Art on Saturday. Organized by the museum’s director, Naomi Vine, with art critic Dave Hickey, the exhibition of 65 works was designed by Alexander’s close friend, artist Billy Al Bengston.

In his Marina del Rey studio, Alexander appears lanky and tan from his seaside life and bemusedly patrician, wearing a well-cut blazer over his green shirt and slacks, with pale orange socks visible above the blue running shoes. He smokes determinedly, using a cigarette holder as he lounges on a pink linen sofa that stands on an area rug cut from synthetic turf. The studio walls offer some recent work: nightscapes of the L.A. streets and purple palm trees against a lemon sky. “They are all about the specificity of light,” Alexander says. “Does it glow? How bright is it? How dim is it? Does it have a color?”

In his catalog essay, Hickey writes, “[Alexander’s] art has always devoted its most profound attention to the soft, glistening, metamorphic edge of things, where solids turn liquid and liquids dissolve into atmosphere, where sight and touch are indistinguishable and we can always feel the air as it moves in off the ocean.”

Alexander says, “Why do I like night skies, water, polka dots? I go through the memory bank and come up with the most vivid memories that I have.” He cites another childhood observation, during World War II, when freshly manufactured airplanes were sent to El Toro for test flights. “The pilots would come out over the ocean at Newport at night and dogfight,” he recalls. “Sometimes they would blow up, so it was like looking at the war from your frontyard. I remember the flames coming out of these planes as they went into the ocean. It was horrific, but at the same time I was distanced enough from it as a kid that what I saw was the spectacle.”

Pausing for clarification, he adds, “The memories are real but it would be presumptuous to think you know what you are doing as a painter. These are not literal translations, they are sensual translations.”

Alexander’s fascination with light first manifested itself while he was studying art at UCLA in the mid-’60s. Having surfed from the age of 13, he realized that the resin applied as the gloss coat to his board could refract and hold light. In no time, he was casting resin into elemental and geometric shapes like pyramids, cubes and wedges. The forms of frozen light held the eerie translucence of a glassy wave briefly poised before the thunderous crash into surf.

“Minimalism was in the air at the time. The idea was no fingerprints, no evidence of how something was made,” Alexander says. Even more influential were the years, from 1957 to 1965, that he spent studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, the Architectural Assn. in London, UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California. Just before graduating from USC, he worked for architect William Pereira, at which time he realized “architecture wasn’t for me.”

After transferring to UCLA’s art department, where he finished his undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine arts in 1966, the resin sculptures reflected his architectural understanding of the relationship of light to form. “It was a rational architectural thought process that was being attached to the objects. To use Louis Kahn’s phrase, ‘What does the building want to be?’ What does the object want to be? What does the material want to be? The early cubes and wedges were dictated by molds of quarter-inch tempered glass. It made everything geometric, which was the objective. I imagined that was the kind of person I was,” he says.

The resin wedges provided a meteoric rise for Alexander as a young artist who had gallery and museum shows in New York and Europe. In the early ‘70s, however, Alexander developed an allergy to the resin, which resulted in a poisoning of his system, so he quit the material forever. He developed an equally strong aversion to the recondite critical writing that supported the growing Minimalist movement. “There was this enormous rhetoric about what objects were. If you have to have all this explanation to determine what something is, something is wrong. I did an about-face and said to myself, ‘I want to make a picture.’ ”

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In 1972, Alexander moved to Tuna Canyon in Malibu with his first wife, Clytie Alexander, and his two daughters, Hope and Julia. There he built a large, airy house, doing much of the labor himself. At the end of the day, he picked up pastels to record the dots of colored light upon the water. Clytie was selling antique quilts at the time, and he became fascinated by the patterns of velvet. “They could be baroque and goofy and eccentric,” he says. Soon, he had stretched 10 panels with black velvet and painted them with glittering sunsets. “I made the jump with enormous trepidation,” he says. “But I thought if you are stupid enough to do a sunset picture, it’s perfectly consistent that you can do a sunset on velvet.”

Alexander’s style switch, from cool resin to hot kitsch, was executed when the art world was dominated by highly reductive and conceptual practices, and black velvet sunsets by anyone other than a garage attendant were inconceivable. “People couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong,” Alexander says. “It was like, ‘What you were doing was so good and now what’s going on?’ ”

The artist himself didn’t know what was going on and decided to shelve the idea. Then, in 1979, on a night fishing trip to San Clemente Island, he stood on the boat’s deck and through lights shone into the black water, he saw schools of squid, sharks and other fish. Excitedly, he returned to the idea of making tapestries by pinning vaguely aquatic shapes cut from satin, tulle and netting to unstretched black velvet. Clytie Alexander, a painter, collaborated on the works by basting and then sewing the designs onto the fabric. Exhibited at Santa Monica’s now-defunct James Corcoran Gallery, these works brought critical kudos.

In 1981, Alexander’s 17-year marriage came apart, and though Clytie continued to help him with the tapestries, he was finished with the series by 1983. Peter Alexander decided to paint pictures in earnest. “I had been avoiding painting my whole life. I had done drawing and collage, but not painting in a strict sense. I was terrified. All of a sudden I was doing something that was going to be like everybody else,” he says.

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Like the rest of his work, his paintings, too, reflect his status as a fourth-generation Southern Californian. His father inherited his grandfather’s oil wells and owned a company that manufactured petroleum equipment. His mother had been a model at Bullock’s Wilshire. The family lived on the beach in Newport because his father dedicated most of his free time to sailing.

Alexander’s lifelong “love affair with L.A.” meant never moving to New York, though Peter’s older brother, Brooke, moved there in 1965 and established a contemporary art gallery in SoHo. Although the Brooke Alexander Gallery has rarely shown Peter’s work, the artist says, “We get along now better than we ever have.” In fact, Peter, who married artist and violinist Claudia Parducci in 1997, has a 16-month-old son named Pietro Brooke, in honor of his brother.

Over the last 15 years, L.A. has been the subtext of Peter Alexander’s nocturnal streetscapes with names like Lawndale, Los Feliz or Chinatown. These pictures grew more ominous after the riots of 1992. The following year, the Malibu fires destroyed the home he had built in Las Flores Canyon as well as the Tuna Canyon house he no longer owned. These dispiriting events led him to seek solace in weekend trips to Las Vegas.

“Everything in L.A. started getting dark, and I was there with it, so I started to go to Las Vegas for bright lights. I started looking at Caesars Palace and thought the fake statues were such a great personification of Vegas,” he explains. “Then I painted the palm trees with light on them. Like sunsets, they are a cliche, so we don’t really see them anymore.”

Flipping through the catalog for his upcoming show, Alexander seems preoccupied. “On the surface, the work doesn’t seem consistent. I’m looking forward to the survey with pleasure, but something is chewing away at me. I am really looking forward to seeing all this stuff together. Then, I think, the connections will be obvious.”

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“PETER ALEXANDER: IN THIS LIGHT,” Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Dates: Opens Saturday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.. Ends Sept. 12. Prices: $5 adults; $4 seniors and students; children under 16 are free. Phone: (949) 759-1122.