Gill Alexander is a figurative artist who works exclusively on paper. His highly realistic drawings are filled with great detail. Many are painstakingly constructed from arrays of tiny black stippling dots. Gill also works with markers. The marker drawings have a more painterly feel but, nevertheless, contain just as much intricacy. All of Gill’s work is labor intensive and some drawings can take up to 300 hours to complete.
Gill Alexander was born in Durham, North Carolina and later moved to upstate New York when his father became a French professor at the State University at Albany. Gill moved to Portland, Oregon to study English literature at Reed College where he later graduated Phi Berta Kappa in 1984. Gill was drawn to comic books at a young age and his one time youthful desire to write them eventually transformed into an ambition to draw. Gill is entirely self taught and his early graphic novels were highly idiosyncratic and cerebral. His main inspiration at the time was Jennifer Bartlett’s 1976 Rhapsody installation, which he regarded as a conceptual graphic novel. Gill’s sequences of drawings were meant to function both as published book as well as gallery displayed art. Much of this work was shown at Portland’s PDXS Gallery in 1986.
From 1986 on Gill’s work became almost exclusively figurative. The paintings of Robert Birmelin were a formative influence, particularly after Gill moved to Chicago in 1987. The epistemology of seeing and the syntax through which one learns to engage the world started to become the subject. Gill’s ongoing Figurines Series features isolated figures, presented without background. Their negative space can sometimes be confusing. Other, full frame drawings present similar figures caught at moments in which they are engaged in heightened visual interactions with their environments. Often the people shown in the drawings are caught at moments of divided focus.
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Gill’s work was shown in galleries in 24 states in all regions of the US. He had several one person shows, many of which were at large State Universities. Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio were a few. Gill became a featured artist under contract with Goforth Rittenhouse Galleries in Philadelphia in 1992 just before moving to Miami Beach.
Since that time Gill’s role as caretaker during a particularly devastating family illness has meant that he has been less active in showing. But, illness has subsided somewhat and Gill has actively resumed the process of drawing as well as exhibiting. Gill works from his home in Miami Beach, Florida.
