Alexandra Tyng
September 6 – 28, 2019
"Scavengers is my visual description of how it feels to have one’s privacy invaded. The idea first came into my mind after a recent biography of my father was published. In it were intimate details of his personal life that were inevitably going to come out, but as well-written as the book was, my family found it hard to go through the experience of having our private life revealed to the public. Still harder was the experience of reading reviews of the book and people’s thoughtless comments. The characters in the painting are my siblings and I. As I planned the work I asked my sister and brother to describe their strongest emotion around the experience. My sister felt an impulse to protect her parents, my brother was afraid the book would provoke arguments and bad feelings, and I was nervous about how the personal information I had shared with the author would be written about and interpreted. I incorporated our responses into the composition." - Alexandra Tyng
Alexandra Tyng was featured in the November/December issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors. Carl Little discusses Tyng's relationship with Maine and the processes behind her plein air paintings. "Plein air painting," she told critic Stephen May, is "my source of ideas, and a way of keeping my brushstrokes fresh and my color sense accurate."
Alexandra Tyng has just been featured in Articulate, an Emmy® award-winning arts and culture show nationally syndicated on PBS. The segment “Pictures of You” explores how portraits are “a lie that illustrates the truth.” In the interview with Alexandra, she gives her professional insight into the unique relationship between artist and subject, highlighting the trust that the subject places in the artist.
When my grandparents retired they bought a farmhouse with the idea that it would be an ideal place for their children and grandchildren to gather. They commissioned my mother to design an addition to the house that became known as “the ship” because of its unusual shape. It was the first space frame ever built for living. Unfortunately it burned to the ground several years after my grandmother sold the house. Recently I became curious to find the spot where it used to be.
Linda Tracey Brandon is an imaginative realist painter working in oils and graphic media. She frequently writes about art lindatraceybrandon.com
Alexandra Tyng’s painting, Jet Streams, will be the cover art for “Art of Acadia” (June 2016,) the new book by brothers David and Carl Little. Jet Streams will also be part of Acadia National Park’s Centennial celebration in an exhibit at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratories this summer.
Shawn Fields and Alexandra Tyng are listed as two of the 50 Memorable Painters, as curated by John Seed and Didi Melendez, 2015 edition.
Whether studying aerial views from a plane, painting from a model, or working directly from nature, this Philadelphia artist establishes a reason to paint something. For her, there has to be a theme or an idea worth exploring.
An excerpt: “My figurative work is the most personal of all my work. It’s where I allow myself to explore ideas that interest me and really get deeply into them. The scenes come out of my imagination and, because they did not actually happen, the events and people are not bound by time. Sometimes in a single painting I’ll put two figures that are really one person at two different ages, or several figures that lived a hundred years apart. I like it to look as if it were actually happening, or could have happened, so it’s important to me to get the perspective and lighting and viewpoint consistent. It’s all in the service of the concept.”
Words that come to mind when thinking about the art of Alexandra Tyng: intelligence, knowledge and talent; or perhaps independence, perception and determination. Tyng, 58, stands out among contemporary representational painters for her comprehensive grasp of art history, and for the inquiring mind that infuses her compositions. A mature artist at the top of her game, she knows what she wants—and how to achieve it in paint. Tyng reached her current confident, accomplished style by unconventional means, shunning art school and bucking the tide of Abstract Expressionism in the 1970s by becoming a realist painter.
Alexandra Tyng lives in Philadelphia and has spent summers in Maine since childhood. She began drawing and painting the Maine landscape as a teenager while staying at a nineteenth century rustic camp on one of Mount Desert Island’s lakes, and at her brother’s lighthouse home in Penobscot Bay. In the 1990s she began chartering planes so she could take reference photos of the glacially carved land formations of coastal Maine, which she uses as references to create large-scale paintings. She also paints panoramas from mountaintops, and closer, more intimate views of places. Every summer she spends several weeks painting outside on Mount Desert, Monhegan, Deer Isle, and various other locations. Seen as a whole, her work presents a hierarchy of viewpoints, worlds within worlds. Not only does Alex convey her personal connection to the places she paints, but also she examines the abstract interplay of land and water. Islands in the sea can be seen as the opposite of lakes surrounded by land—or as variations of the same figure-ground relationship.
Alex has had solo shows in Maine, New York and Philadelphia. She was selected as one of Maine’s outstanding artists by Maine Home+Design in 2008. Her Maine landscapes have been featured on the cover of The Art of Acadia by David and Carl Little, inThe Art of Monheganby Carl Little, and in numerous art periodicals. Her work resides in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT, and the Springfield Art Museum in MO. Alex’s paintings can be found in public, corporate and private collections in the U.S. and abroad.
Her paintings and portraits have garnered many awards. The most notable and recent of these include two 1st Place awards from the Portrait Society of America; Best of Show from the 8th Annual National Figurative Exhibition at the Lore Degenstein Gallery in 2016; the Plein Air Magazine Award from the International ARC Salon in 2015; and the Curator’s Choice Award from America’s Parksin in 2012. She has also received awards from Allied Artists of America, the Woodmere Art Museum, The Artist’s Magazine, and American Artist Magazine.
Primarily self-taught, Alex chose an academic education over art school, receiving a B.A. from Harvard College and an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania. She taught herself traditional oil painting techniques by examining the work of the old masters, reading about the methods and materials of other artists, and watching artists paint. She has taught classes and workshops in Maine and Philadelphia, and has served on the faculty of the Portrait Society of America. In May of 2019 she will be giving a talk, Visual Storytelling, at Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia.
