Malcolm Alexander is an artist whose search for aesthetic meaning has taken him on a more than 40-year journey through various media, styles and techniques. But no matter where he has traveled within the landscape of expression, Alexander always returns to the traditional concepts of figure and form that were central to his earliest education in the arts.

He was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son of an automotive engineer, where from a young age, he struggled with the learning difficulties of dyslexia. Unable to fit into many of the learning methods of that era, he turned to art and music, shaping tiny figures from clay and fingering notes on a saxophone. What he discovered within those realms of creativity not only eased the years of frustration caused by his difficulties but began to lay the stepping stones that would lead him toward a future as an artist.

From the little-known to the well-known, Alexander next found himself being asked to create an 18-foot monument dedicated to the 72,000 men and women who built the Alaskan Pipeline. That was followed by a nine foot portrait of actor Jimmy Stewart, beloved by his fans as the working guy next door, for his hometown in Indiana, Pa. on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Next came an 18-foot monument commemorating the 25th anniversary of Alaskan statehood.

But by 1986 Alexander again found himself dissatisfied with his work. Once again he wanted to push the boundaries of his expression. What he now realized what was missing from his work was "an encounter." He remembered hearing it said that the greatness of a work of art is not that it portrays the thing observed, but that it portrays the artist's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the art is unique, original, never to be duplicated.

Using this philosophy Alexander said good-bye to representational sculpture and embarked upon a search, "an odyssey" to discover his own way of expressing the relationship of the human figure and of sculpture in landscape. Through the encounter and experimentation, the work of Malcolm Alexander keeps moving toward a distant, unknown destination seemingly always just beyond his horizon. But something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before.

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