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Friday, December 18, 2015

Featured Painter of the Day: Larry D. Alexander

[Larry_Alexander051_bw%5B1%5D.jpg]Larry Dell Alexander (born May 30, 1953) is an American artist, Christian author and teacher from Dermott, Arkansas in Chicot County. Alexander is best known for his creations of elaborate colorful, and black & white "pen and ink" drawings in his "crosshatching", or "hatching" technique. He also received notoriety and a personal presidential thanks for his personal rendition of a "Clinton Family Portrait" oil painting which he gave to U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1995. It is now a part of the collection at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is also known for the Arkansas Schools Tours that he did between 1996 and 2006. He has written several devotional Bible studies commentaries on several New Testament books of the Christian Bible, and has also created many drawings and paintings with strong Christian themes over the years.
In early 1996 Alexander finished and released his popular "Dermott Series", a 20 piece collection of oil and acrylic paintings that offered a nostalgic look back at his childhood of growing up in rural southeast Arkansas...
The paintings feature images of people, buildings, and sites of Dermott, Arkansas, such as a cotton gin, his childhood house, where he went to school, and other images. Alexander said at the time that, "I did the Dermott Series for many personal reasons, and I'm overwhelmed by the response this collection is creating here in Texas". The series includes, "Birthplace", "Where I grew up", "Picking Cotton", "Cotton Gin", "Hot Grits", "In the kitchen with mama", and the old Chicot County High School, among others.
In 1999 Alexander unveiled his "Detroit Series", a series of oil and acrylic paintings of various sites in Detroit, Michigan at the American Black Artist Institute on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. The nine piece series includes paintings on Belle Isle Park, the Detroit skyline, the Detroit River, Hitsville USA (the original home for Motown Records), Greektown Historic District, the old Tiger Stadium (Detroit), the old J.L. Hudson building, former mayor Coleman A. Young, and many more.
In May 1998 Alexander unveiled his "Delta Series, which was painted entirely with acrylics, during "the Arkansas Schools Tours". The tour was expanded that year to include stops in Greenville, Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee. This series included paintings of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain region from Monroe, Louisiana to Memphis. It includes a painting of Graceland, Elvis Presley's former home, the landmark Greenville Courthouse in Greenville, a perspective of Beale Street in Memphis, and his classic rendition of a "Cotton Farm" among others. Another piece from the Delta Series, "Aunt Eira Mae" was donated to the permanent collection of The African American Museum (Dallas, Texas) in 2004.
Alexander's most popular Pen and Ink art series, "The Sixties Series" has been exhibited in schools, libraries, and art institutions in several places since it was completed in 1993. It consists of elaborate drawings of well known figures and events of the 1960s, such as the civil rights Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, and portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Rosa Parks. This series also covers the Vietnam War.
The theme pieces in the collection are a piece called "Composite Sixties", and one called "Composite Protests", which make up a composite of people, places and events that were prominent in the 1960s. For example, they show images of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, the United States presidents who served during the sixties, also J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, an image of U.S. astronauts landing on the moon in 1969, and many of the American protests that took place during this turbulent decade, to name a few.

Larry D. Alexander select paintings:

 



Larry Dell Alexander Official site: http://www.thelarrydalexander.com