By Julia Reed | Sept/Oct 08 | Southern Masters

John Alexander's True Nature

How a swamp rat from Beaumont, Texas, clawed his way to the top of the art world

It is the first day of the second weekend of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and I am in my car with John Alexander. Like most of the music-loving tourists in town, he is dressed in jeans and sneakers and armed with a camera bag, but unlike them, and pretty much everybody else we both know, we are not headed in the direction of the fairgrounds. It’s not that he’s not a fan—he flies down for it almost every year. It’s just that on this particular day, he has chosen to forgo the arguable pleasures of, say, the ARK-LA-Mystics or the Creole Zydeco Farmers in favor of the abundant flora and fauna of the Audubon Zoo.

To say that Alexander is a nature buff is to vastly understate the case, a fact that becomes immediately apparent upon looking at almost any of the works from his thirty-odd-year career. There are the swampy, palmetto-choked landscapes of the 1980s, so teeming with life you’d swear the canvas was humming, and the stunning flower paintings of the 1990s. There are the more recent dazzlingly pristine renderings of a single specimen—a perfect crab claw, a shimmering flounder, a regal marabou stork—along with the masterly views of Montauk Point or The Mighty Bog. More recent still are the epic “still lifes” that are anything but—my own includes shrimp and crabs skittering across the canvas while an interested turkey buzzard looks on. All of them are vivid evidence of the depth of his obsession. Most also feature recurring motifs (mackerels and snakes and egrets and crows, to name a very, very few) pulled not from an overactive imagination but from the occasionally lurid primeval landscape of his actual memory.

The only child of Zeila Thrash and John Alexander, Sr., the young John grew up in the East Texas town of Beaumont, a port on the Gulf of Mexico with a subtropical climate and an economy based on timber and the oil refineries that dotted the coast. His father, thirty-five years his mother’s senior, was sixty-eight years old and already retired as a construction engineer when his son was born. The elder Alexander was a Spanish-American War veteran who was born less than fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. Not only was he able to provide his son a window into the fantastical and bygone natural world of his own youth, he had the time to introduce him to the more tangible delights of the existing one. They fished the nearby bayous and swamps in a wooden boat he’d built with his own hands. They pitched tents out in the dense hardwood forests, accompanied by the kinds of creatures whose eyes stare back at you in so many of Alexander’s wild and painterly eighties works. Alexander revered his “early environmentalist” father: “He knew every bird, every spider, and every sound in the swamp.” Now sixty-two, the son could well be talking about himself.