Alexander Creswell

Classically inspired watercolorist Alexander Creswell paints monuments—from antiquity to the Baroque—alongside modern urban and architectural spaces. Using custom-sized watercolor paper to accommodate his massive paintings, he exploits the properties of the medium to absorb and refract light and to create large, theatrical experiences of landscape. The size allows him to capture parts of monuments so detailed as to almost stand alone as individual landscape paintings. British painter J.M.W. Turner was of formative influence to Creswell’s vigorous, gestural brushstrokes and use of light. In “The Grand Scale” (2004-2006), he exhibited the largest classical watercolors on a single sheet ever painted to date. In preparation for the exhibition, he toured monuments all over Europe, making provisional sketches of the sites of antiquity traditionally painted by European Neoclassical painters of the 17th through 19th centuries.