tOMOrrOW's AnsWers tODAY - AkzoNobel

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history is littered with
tortured genius. Dozens of
brilliantly creative minds have
been ravaged by personal demons,
with Vincent van Gogh (depression) and
Jackson Pollock (alcohol) among the
most famous to have suffered over centuries of
artistic expression.
So when renowned painter Alex Echo faced a career
crossroads a few years ago, it’s no surprise that dark forces
threatened to close in on him. With the recession raging, a divorce
looming and sales of his work drying up, the pain and hardship
that had befallen so many before him was slowly tightening its
relentless grip. “My life was collapsing,” he admits. “I could have
done one of two things. I could have jumped off a bridge, or
paint a painting. I decided to paint a painting.”
Only a few months earlier, Alex had been in Beijing,
creating a huge artwork for a big corporate client. That
trip to China left him with a large supply of tester pots of
his paint of choice, AkzoNobel’s Dulux vinyl matt. So he
got to work. “I got this small canvas panel out and
started to pour the paint on,” he explains. “I then used
a kitchen soup spoon and a kebab skewer to smear it
around and make a tree. Two things immediately
happened. I recognized it was beautiful and I realized
that I loved doing it. I was no longer doing this
conceptual, crazy artwork. I was getting my hands
messy with paint again, like when I first started out
30 years earlier.”
Jumping off a bridge was now the last thing
on his mind, because that one painting
prompted a whirlwind of activity for Alex. Within weeks he had
sold 37 paintings (sight unseen) to a major client in Austria, while
top British fashion designer Sir Paul Smith snapped up one of
his paintings to form the principal pattern for his women’s spring/
summer 2011 collection. Notes Alex: “All of a sudden I was
achieving major sales to huge clients and securing big corporate
commissions, all because of this new style I had adopted using
no brushes, just a spoon, a skewer and Dulux paint.” Now in
demand all over the world, over the last three years he’s sold
more than 300 original paintings, some of them selling for up to
£10,000.
But what is it about Dulux that he finds so special? “The
viscosity is perfect,” he says. “I use water to mix different colors
and create different viscosities and, because certain pigments
float or sink, I have to think three dimensionally. It’s also color
fast, is made to withstand the elements and direct sunlight and
is eco-friendly. Plus I can go to my local store and choose from
thousands of different colors. It’s a fantastic product.”
A native of Colorado but now based in Surrey in the UK, Alex
has been an artist for more than 35 years. His work has been
bought by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Robert Downey Jr. and
he has just received a secret commission from a world famous
star which could lead to even more exciting opportunities. But
how does he approach a blank canvas? What thought processes
contribute to his creativity? “I have an intention, but the path
varies. It often ends up not exactly where I wanted it but better,
other times not quite where I wanted it but good enough. I’m
racing against time really, pouring the paint on and covering the
whole surface, so I have to act very quickly. I’m effectively moving
the paint around while it’s drying. It reaches a point where I can’t
move it around anymore and that’s part of the joy. It forces me
to make radical aesthetic decisions very quickly, so it’s essentially
the medium that dictates how far I can go.”
But that specter of the tortured genius is never far away.
“With every single painting I have ever done, there’s a point where