* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Alexandra Sherman is a Washington, D.C. based artist who earned an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Alexandra explains the work by by saying, “these paintings are about contrasts, push and pull, and charting a course where possible whilst accepting that control is an illusion. They are about making plans in the face of uncertainty and seeing light within the dark. The Wayfarer reacts to and makes her way through lands of darkness and light, fullness and emptiness, lightness and heaviness, being pushed or pulled in an unpredictable environment. The support upon which they are painted is a synthetic paper called Yupo made of Polypropylene, a thermoplastic polymer. Yupo is a non-absorbent surface that resists watercolor rather than allowing absorption as with traditional watercolor papers. Pigments separate when saturated to a certain degree and settle in semi-predictable patterns thus rendering the paintings in a sate of controlled chaos while the paint remains wet. The chaos of the technical aspects of these works also act in part as their subject. Additionally, certain non-staining pigments can be removed entirely making subtractive work possible. Time, temperature, and gravity also play an important and mostly unreliable role.”
