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Culture August 6, 2018
Her art brings paintings to life.
Alexa Meade is a game-changer.
She’s taken the traditional painter’s canvas and thrown it out the window. Instead of painting a portrait of her subject, Alexa Meade paints on her subject.
That’s right. Meade takes 3D art and turns it 2D. Its the classic style of trompe l’oeil, in reverse.
Her most recent work was painting Ariana Grande for her “God Is a Woman” music video. But this 31-year-old artist has been painting long before teaming up with Grande.
I spoke to Alexa about how she got to where she is now and what drives her when inspiration is running low.
Alexa Meade attended Vassar College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science. She said that she had always seen herself working in politics, but suddenly found herself inspired by art when she ended up painting her friend’s face and torso.
After graduation, she moved to Washington D.C. to work for President Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
“While working on the campaign, I kind of realized— maybe that’s not what I want to do with my life. And I didn’t know what it was I should be doing, and I thought, you know… I might as well go off and do something ridiculous, and I decided to become an artist.”
Alexa began painting in 2009 with no formal art education. In a TedTalk titled “Your Body is My Canvas”, she shared that though this was intimidating at first, she really let her passion drive her.
“When I first started my art career, I was really bummed that I hadn’t gone to art school.” But her experience in liberal arts gave her some flexibility. She states that a liberal arts education allows graduates to “take on things across so many disciplines without being specialized. I really credit that for allowing me to go across from politics to art.”
Meade has since received significant recognition, proving that it’s never too late to change career paths. Her fame also provides a female voice in the visual art industry, which many artists say is dominated by men.
After her switch to art, Alexa Meade’s political interests didn’t disappear. She says that one project of hers “had a huge political reach.”
The artist painted dancers Lil Buck and Jon Boogz in their critically acclaimed short film “The Color of Reality”. The film, which tells a story about gun violence and racial tension in the U.S. “ended up winning CNN’s Great Big Story ‘Art as Impact award.'”
“I have really different people to make art for… whether its portraits, promotional, music videos. I look really closely at the brand in order to see if I identify with it.”
Bottom line? Meade asks herself: “Is it something that I’d be proud to have my name on?”
After looking at the projects in her portfolio, she definitely should be proud.
In 2013, Mini Cooper hired her to fly to Japan and paint one of their new cars in their Mini Cooper x Alexa Meade “Not Normal” campaign.
She also worked with Ralph Lauren for their Denim & Supply Project Warehouse in order to promote Ralph Lauren’s new clothes.
And in July 2018, Meade painted Ariana Grande for the single “God Is a Woman.”
In “Alexa // Sheila – Milk,” she and fellow artist Sheila Vand explored “fluidity of form” while painting subjects and submerging them in milk. Meade took that as inspiration for her work with Grande, who languishes in a pool of purple paint and milk alternatives. Grande features this art in the single’s music video as well as the cover.
Meade explains that she hasn’t experienced specific events that were signifiers of her success. Instead, she experiences moments that take her by surprise.
“Yeah, that happens a lot. It’s funny, because the moments where it happens, it’s not like at this point where you think ‘okay, well, if I just achieve this, I’ll have made it…’ At every point along the way, there’s different signifiers where it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, this is unexpected.'”
Some of these signifiers occurred outside her professional life. Meade explains her parents had been concerned that she “wasn’t getting what they called a ‘real job.'” It was a big deal when they changed their minds.
“I think that the first moment that my parents really recognized that I wasn’t just messing around, that I was actually an artist… That felt like a moment of accomplishment.”
“The biggest challenge would be to really carve away enough time in my schedule—to have just a blank space where there’s nothing I actually need to do—so I could actually fix out ideas.”
“[When] I have a project with a deadline, and I’m in the studio to make this big thing… what challenges me is being really protective of my time to make sure that I have time to… not know what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. Those are the times where I actually come up with new ideas. But that’s the hardest time to put… in your schedule.”
“I go through periods where I’m super excited and feel like I need to make five million things… and I want to orient every second of my day to it. But then I also go through periods where I’m just like ‘I don’t know what I wanna do,’ and I’m uncomfortable, and I get anxious. I find that when I have a moment when I’m actually inspired, I want to make sure that I run with it and that I truly follow that and not to waste any moment of inspiration.”
“My favorite things that I’ve made have been things that I haven’t been able to visualize in advance. So, I think a big part of it is that if you have just an inkling of an idea, you don’t need to wait until you can visualize the whole thing to get started.”
“Just start, and allow the process to guide you … I call it ‘thinking with my hands.’ I have to physically be doing it and feeling it for the next step to appear before I actually know where I’m going. Don’t be afraid of that. Allow yourself to get sucked into a starting point where you don’t know where it will go.”
With all her accomplishments and career leaps, this young artist is breaking ground and reinventing what art means to her. It’s natural that others might want to follow in her footsteps. Follow her path here.
Then take a page out of Alexa Meade’s book, lead with your feelings and let yourself go where you need to go.
