PAINTER IN RESIDENCE: Peter Alexander at the Fairmont Miramar
Los Angeles Times, pub. Date TBA

"I'm captivated by this right now," said Peter Alexander, casting a speculative eye around a half dozen paintings in progress, propped against the side of a couch in his luxury bi-level bungalow suite at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. Alexander is the Los Angeles-based artist who first came to prominence as the creator of spare, elegant resin sculptures in the 60s, one of the so-called Light and Space artists; and who later, in the 70s, shocked the generally unshockable world of cutting-edge art with his pictures of sunsets, of all things-on velvet.

The source of this current fascination was the surface of water, specifically his sensual new images of the swimming pool at the Miramar. He was in the middle of a five-week residence of intensive painting there, in one of the $700-$850 per night bungalows, hideaways since the 1920s for the rich and glamorous. His only obligation was to look around him and paint whatever he felt like-all at no expense to himself, except for an agreed fifty percent of room service costs.

Sound like a good deal? Alexander, a sometime sports fan, brainstormed the idea last year after a Lakers' game at the Staples Center, where he'd gone in the company of the Santa Monica gallery dealer, Craig Krull, and Matt DiNapoli, whose investment group owns the hotel. Alexander was still high on the experience of participating in the painting contest run annually in June by the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association, culminating in an exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach. He didn't win. He could hardly have expected to win, a well-known contemporary artist in a field of lesser-known, more traditionally-oriented inheritors of the California Impressionist school of the 1920s and 1930s.

But he was exhilarated by the experience of working for five weeks non-stop out of studio, in the garage of Laguna art dealer Peter Blake, and staying at a shorefront hotel, without the distractions of telephone, business, social life-even family, except at weekends: Alexander, with daughters in their mid-thirties from an earlier marriage, is recently remarried and dotes on his four-year old son. "He's the most extraordinary person I've ever been with," he enthuses. But he allows also that, at 62, age makes a dent in his energy.

The Laguna experience left him with the clear understanding that he works best without distractions. With this kind of freedom and intensity, he could produce more in five weeks than in a whole year in the studio. "Laguna was fabulous," he recalls. "I can't tell you how much fun I had."

So why not, he proposed to DiNapoli, a similar stint at the Miramar? A longtime Santa Monica resident, he has devoted much of his energy as an artist to capturing the particular qualities of sparkling light, the lush vegetation, and the nocturnal enchantments of the coastal city, as well as its warm, slightly decadent, somehow innocent, yet urbane sensuality. The Miramar, dowager queen of the city, with its rich cultural history, looked like a perfect base of operations.

"He was excited, we were excited," recalls DiNapoli, who was familiar with Alexander's work from a previous hotel installation in Santa Fe, California, and who aims to promote a "synergy between the art community and our hotels." For the hotel, he says, "it was a way to bring together all our admiration and support for art in Santa Monica."

Once installed in his luxury digs, Alexander went to work on the hotel and its environs. He's not a plein air painter-by definition, one who sits outdoors with an easel, and works directly from the land- or cityscape. He has always used some photographic medium to record impressions and details from which he then works indoors, in artificial light. Until recently, it has been a 35 millimeter camera or a Polaroid.

For the Miramar project, it was a Sony digital video camera. "With the video camera," explains Alexander, "I compose less, and shoot more for information." With stop-frame images, he adds, "you see all this stuff that you didn't see before, because of your built-in prejudices." The printed images that result are of less than photographic quality, suggesting something of the shimmer that lends his paintings their richly evocative depth, and they cluttered every surface in the bungalow during his stay there, some discarded, some serving as source material for the images he was beginning to create.

These, too, were everywhere. Heaps of pastel drawings on Alexander's favored coarse black paper, acrylic paintings laid out on table- and counter-tops to dry, images lying about on the furniture or pinned on walls-a veritable maelstrom of work and energy. In addition to the pool paintings, there were night-time views of the pier and the fun fair, street scenes with dazzling car headlights piercing the surrounding darkness, some sketches of the flora in the hotel gardens, glowing with sunlight or the gleam of artificial illumination after dark, all a part of the local ambiance.

Still, it was sunlight on water that seemed to fascinate him most, perhaps because it presented him with an entirely new challenge. Shooting down into the pool from the eighth floor with his video camera, he had captured the slightly unreal blue of the pool-not only the constantly shifting, glittering surface of the water, but also its depth.

To recreate the image in acrylic paint, he had been working on panels made white and smooth with gesso, applying color with sponges loaded with water. "The method worked," he pronounced, pleased with the results. "I was astounded. You really do want to fall into that water." The loose, translucent surfaces of the resulting pictures shimmer with the familiar inviting aqua glow of a swimming pool. To many of them he has temporarily attached the green, painted image of a palm frond, to help anchor the otherwise disoriented eye. "I keep wanting not to have the leaves," the artist continues, peeling one off and trying it in another place, standing back to judge the effect. "I want to let the water tell the story. But they do give you that tweak of reality."

A part of the deal with the hotel included a one-day exhibition in the hotel itself, scheduled for May 11. Alexander will be bringing the pictures back home, as it were, and completing the cycle of the project. The show will include the whole spectrum of the work, from the night scenes to the gardens and pools-an artist's take on the spirit of this little corner of paradise. Later, from May 24 through June 29, the exhibition of a much larger selection from the entire collection at the Craig Krull Gallery should make for a fascinating glimpse at the way an artist does his own special take on the world around him.