"Chagall and Miro drew me closer to art as a more emotional interaction rather than just looking at a painting." Alex thinks that art, in any form, takes equal parts of talent and passion. One without the other is like a child sitting alone on a seesaw. Alex knew he had the passion. Now he wanted to see if he had the other half of the equation. No, Alex didn't run back to his office, quit his job, take his life savings and move to Vitebsk. But he did run out and buy paint, brushes and papers. That same day. And he's been painting ever since.
But Alex, does a lot more exploring than
that. He is also a photographer and virtuoso guitarist. He remembers: "I always had a love for
music. There was an old, acoustic guitar around the house, and I picked it up
one day and started picking out a tune. guess I was around seven or eight then.
It was sort of weird because pretty soon my fingers started doing things I
wasn't telling them to... I was playing chords and strumming. By the time I was
eleven, I was thinking, Yeah. I want to be a musician. Get an electric guitar.
Play the blues. Rock and roll. Cool jazz. When I told my parents they said,
Fine. But first you study classical. Then you do your rock and roll."
At age eleven, Alex began studying classical guitar at the Charlie Byrd School of Music and within two years was performing the works of Bach and Villa Lobos at recitals. "I think my parents figured I had forgotten all about rock and roll and the blues. But when I told them I still wanted to do that, it was the first time I ever saw eyes gasp!" He laughs: "They must have flashed to a scene where I was tattooed and body-pierced, up there wasting my life away in an orgy of fame and fortune." Whatever Alex's parents flashed on, the results were the same: no electric guitar. "I quit studying classical after that, but I did keep playing. Still do. In my early twenties I played in a few rock bands--but I kept my day job." Still, he says, music remains a passion that is very much connected to painting.: "Sometimes I see colors when I listen to music, and hear music when I look at paintings..." which may explain his large collection of music and art, an eclectic accumulation that runs the gamut from Miles Davis to Muddy Waters to Mozart, from Kandinsky to Klee to African and Native American works.
There is another form he has recently been exploring: the iPad. Always heeding that whispered feeling, Alex has transformed the cold, squared screen into a canvas of shapes and colors that is as brilliant and beautiful as it is cutting edge. "The world is full of canvases. There's an artist out in L.A. who paints on palm fronds, Styrofoam packaging material- almost anything most of us would toss in the dumpster, he sees as a canvas for his work. The way I see the iPad screen
His affinity for photography started in his early teens. Again, he saw the lens as a new canvas for his expressions. "I fell in love with composing an image in the camera without changing the lighting or setting up the shot. It is the pureness of that moment that I wanted to capture…the beauty of the ordinary that elevates it to the extraordinary." A passion for painting. Music. Photography. A Renaissance man? A skeptic could say Renaissance man is just a person who has found an extremely creative way of not being able to make up his mind. Alex has another perspective on it: "We're all Renaissance men and women. Life has too many variables, throws too many options at us for us not to be. But the difference between living it and really enjoying it, is finding your passions. In those moments--and it can happen just once or throughout a lifetime in those moments when passion coincides with talent, that's when it becomes art."
