Laura Alexander is best known for her large-scale, vividly colored oil portraits. Visitors to the Hoboken Museum in 2012 might remember the striking, four-foot-tall portraits in her “Mostly Rosemary” exhibit. She also had a solo exhibit titled “Portraits” in 2005, featuring a charismatic redhead named Olivia, among others.

“Olivia used to live in a shelter in Hoboken, from 2004 through 2006,” Alexander says. “I would find her, usually at Barnes and Noble, and bring her to my studio for a photo shoot. We did this for about two years or so, and I painted 13 large oil paintings as a result of these photo shoots.”

Eventually the artist lost track of Olivia, but as a birthday gift this year, she says, “I painted a tiny portrait of Olivia. I had 450 photographs. Sifting through these photos, I was drawn back in.” It took a few attempts, but she tracked Olivia to a safe housing residence in New York, where she was invited to a visit. “I brought soup and my camera.”

“I love painting Olivia. Especially her lipstick,” Alexander explains. “She is beautiful and childlike, while cunning and clever. And tragic.” She hopes she captured these qualities in a short video about Olivia that will be on display alongside about 39 examples of her latest work – smaller in format, and in gouache instead of oils – in an exhibit appropriately titled “Reunion.” The exhibit opened Saturday, June 2, with a free reception from 2 – 5 pm, and has been extended until July 29.

For the past 28 years, Alexander has maintained a studio at 720 Monroe Street, the former Levelor factory building. But in 2013, after earning her second fellowship grant from New Jersey State Council on the Arts, she rented a spacious studio at Mana Contemporary, in Jersey City. There, she had plenty of room to work on super-sized canvases, often using herself as a model to represent different aspects of the feminine guise.

Her work is exhibited frequently in New York and New Jersey, and internationally in Japan and Austria. Notable exhibits include the Newark Museum, Morris Museum, Aljira Gallery, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, Maine) and George Segal Gallery. To learn more about her work, visit her website: www.lauraalexander.net. 

After four years at Mana, Alexander brought everything back to Monroe Street. Suddenly, size mattered. “My 450-sq.-ft. studio was already filled with paintings and the additional 15 monster-sized paintings made the space a bit smaller,” she admits.

So she turned to a new medium and new format. “The idea of painting 7” x 10” gouaches at my kitchen table became even more appealing. Gouache is a tricky medium. I use it like oil instead of thinning it like watercolor. It dries darker and the colors become muted easily. This new process gave me a new palette…moody colors instead of my bright, intensely colored oil paintings.”

The switch to gouache dates to 2016, when Alexander flew to the island of St. Bart’s with a friend and needed art supplies she could carry easily, small tubes of paint and a small pad. “The beach scenes soon gave way to the subway series because I began house/dog sitting in New York for a friend who traveled for long periods of time. I would sneak photos with my phone and then paint them from my phone screen.”

Working in gouache from these surreptitious cellphone pictures, Alexander produced several of the 39 paintings in her new exhibit, in addition to new portraits of Olivia. “I got pretty good at it…scoping out the passengers before I took a seat in order to get the most interesting people. Sometimes, I got caught snapping photos and one of these became a painting in the show.”