Viva Lewes Issue #134 November 2017

THIS MONTH’S COVER ARTIST:
This month’s cover is by abstract
painter and printmaker
Alexander Johnson. Given the
theme ‘Noir’, he created the
firework-inspired image using
silk screen ink, rolled onto
black paper. “I like to combine
the printmaking process and
the painting process, and this
seemed like the perfect opportunity.
I think I did two or
three different versions of the
fireworks and kept painting out
where I didn’t like them and
doing it over, which is what I
always do. I don’t start again, I
leave the mistakes underneath,
and hopefully a few of them will
show through so people can see
the working process.”
Alexander operates from his
studio in Laughton, where he’s
been based for the past two
years. “I’d been making figurative
and quite commercial work
up until about ten years ago,”
he says. “But I’d had enough
of making this ok work, that I
could do quite well but I wasn’t
really getting much out of. I decided
I needed to make something
that I liked myself, that
I would put in my own house,
and so I made a conscious decision
to go more abstract, and I
started by working from these
aerial photographs that my father
(pictured, right) had taken
when he was a Spitfire pilot
during the war.”
“I’ve tended to work almost
like a fashion designer in that
I make collections, so I’ll be
on one subject for two or three
years and then it sort of exhausts
itself and then I spend a bit of
time looking around for something
else to do. Six months
after my partner and I moved
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