JULY 2020
SOUTH GALLERY
Home | Alex Rydlinski
Alex Rydlinski is an oil painter from Fairbanks currently living in Kenai. He spent over a decade living in the lower 48, traveling around the country, and trying to get back home to Alaska. In 2017 he studied in Norway with the master painter Odd Nerdrum. He’s been living on the Kenai peninsula for nearly a year, creating a body of work steeped in the old master tradition with special interest in the human being in the Northland wild.
Artist Statement
The things we find most beautiful in nature are often the scars of tremendous violence. The beautiful fjords — the result of glaciers scraping and carving through the rocky cliffs. The beautiful rivers— rushing meltwater relentlessly eroding the earth. The beautiful mountains— the smashing of tectonic plates, sending crumpled crust miles into the sky. Our most beautiful sights could be the plains of Ares.
I try to paint in this same way; coarsely, with a lot of energy, scraped down and taken again, over many sessions over many months. I’ve scored the paint film with beach-washed volcanic pumice stones and scratched at it with kitchen knives. Whole figures have been moved a few inches to the left or right, hand gestures and facial expressions changed, colors endlessly modified - look for these traces and you’ll find them still.
The ideas evolve in this way, too. I start with broad themes and discover ways to reinforce the narratives over time. The old woman picking berries, for example, a picture about human resilience, originally had companions out in the field. But the focus is really about her personal struggle, and it becomes more emotionally intense now that she is all alone. When you think of Sisyphus, do you picture him with friends and family sharing in his burden?
I hope you enjoy my rough, Dionysian pictures, the fruits of my first year back home in Alaska. I’ve tried to strip them of all superficiality and delicacy, and get straight to the raw energy and emotion. In their coarseness, with their conspicuous scars of continuous change, I hope you find their beauty.
Listen to an interview with Alex and Anchorage artist Graham Dane on Out North Radio.