Potemkin (2015)
‘Heart-felt, humane and to the point. On occasions
one image equals one thousand words. Naomi
Alexander delivers just that.’
Anthony Green RA (2014)
‘It is my belief that the most important thing for
an artist is to discover ones own language and
undoubtedly Naomi Alexander has a language
of her own.’
Professor Ken Howard OBE RA
*
'...The studio paintings, both her own and those of other artist friends in whose studios she has also worked at one time or another – notably Paula Rego and Ken Howard – are a rather different story again – quiet, light-filled professional spaces. In many, she includes herself, either directly or as a reflection in a mirror, but even so they become intimate and contemplative, like that depicting her own studio, with its rackety old whitepainted boudoir cupboard covered with reference books, a jar of flowers, its mirror reflecting the plethora of pictures hanging on the walls around.
We somehow know her through this simplicity and open directness. As with the world of feeling and memory which the poet dissects into words, and then reconstructs, so with these interiors in which Naomi Alexander allows objects and accumulations to give shape and meaning to her own understandings of her life – a process of quiet and cumulative discovery.'
Nicholas Usherwood 2015
Author, Editor, Journalist and Curator
'...On her travels she accumulates images of deserts, parks, gardens, homes and people. She brings them all back to the studio where they can live. They lie about in her sketchbooks, sometimes being useful, sometimes even making it into her pictures- but more often the initial candid gaze gives way to a more knowing look…
In the large pictures, the difficulties ol composition. daily routine and sluggish effort do not permit such unguarded spontaneity. In these pictures we witness the accumulated experience of a lifetime - that baggage which takes up so much room and weighs a ton. Here, the streaky paint conveys the threatening environment and the passing of time: little girls push against a barrage of solid middle-aged bodies or play at being ghosts in an already haunted garden.
The good girl stares out from a paddling pool at the spreading shadow of a scarecrow.'
Dame Paula Rego 1997
Painter DBE RA
'Though she is in many obvious ways a very painterly painter, it seems to me that everything in Naomi Alexander’s work comes down basically to draughtsmanship. It is not only that she has a natural understanding of how to capture the shape and solidity of objects and people in line, but that her compositions themselves are always dictated by a strong instinct for graphic form.’
John Russell Taylor 2005
Art Critic for The Times
