Friends and admirers crowded into Gloucester’s Jane Deering Gallery a few weeks back for the opening reception of Willie Alexander’s exhibition “Goya’s head found on Half Moon Beach,” which runs from Oct. 11 to Nov. 3, 2024.
Alexander, who’s a friend of ours, is best known as the Godfather of Boston Punk—now in his 80s and still crooning behind his keyboard in glam eyeliner and with a shock of white hair. Over the years he’s performed with The Lost, The Bagatelle, Grass Menagerie with Doug Yule, Nonie’s Blues, Radio Hearts, a zombie Velvet Underground with Yule (after Lou Reed, John Cale and Sterling Morrison had left the band), his namesake Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band, the Persistence of Memory Orchestra, Fish Eye Brothers, the Raztones, the Fishtones, solo projects, and so on.
But since Alexander was a kid, growing up the son of a Baptist preacher dad and piano-playing mom, in Medfield, Gloucester (1950 to ’55), Newton and East Providence, he’s also made visual art—drawings, collages, paintings, concert fliers, music zines.
“After my moving back to Gloucester from Cambridge in 1997, I began making my own versions of the Gloucester Times,” he writes in an artist statement. Examples here show how he covered newspapers with collaged photos and headlines and texts to become mutant frankenstein reimagined news sources. The exhibition’s title comes from one of Alexander’s headlines.
A 2019 exhibition at Gloucester’s Manship Artists Residency had a number of paintings that were primarily scrawled with words—“Fish Eye,” “Yves Tanguy,” “Angels.” “Right before Covid, I began painting again with the goal of reacting spontaneously to the work and letting the paint do the painting,” Alexander writes. “I don’t sketch beforehand or have a specific idea in mind when I begin working. What emerges are clouds, animals, imaginary landscapes, faces, and body parts.”
The heart of Alexander’s exhibition at Jane Deering is painterly acrylic-on-canvas abstractions that can feel like cousins of Wassily Kandinsky or Hans Hofmann—but, you know, from the line of the family that favors hot pinks and glitter.
Previously:
2024: Willie Alexander, Godfather Of Boston Punk, Celebrates His 81st Birthday
2019: The Secret Art Of The Godfather Of Boston Punk, Willie Alexander
2017: Willie Alexander At Home
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