Alexander Purves: Watercolors and Drawings
October 1-26, 2024
Artist present on Saturdays
A show of watercolors and drawings by Alexander Purves will be held at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City from October 1 through October 26, 2024. All were made during the last three years in northwestern Connecticut, where Purves maintains a studio. The restrictions of the recent years have encouraged us to look closely at the natural world that immediately surrounds us, discovering beauty in tangled vines and random branches. This untidy landscape has been the consistent focus of Purves’s work for many years. The subjects of the current pictures are the trees seen from his studio and the tangles of vines and brambles that invade the landscape immediately outside.
Solo exhibitions of Purves’s watercolors have been held at the Blue Mountain Gallery (2006, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2021) and the Bar des Artistes at the Union League Café in New Haven (2010). The Washington (CT) Art Association has also shown his work (1987, 1992, 2003). In 2002 his travel drawings were exhibited at the Hunter College Leubsdorf Gallery in a show entitled “On Site,” and in 2013 the Whitney Humanities Center mounted an exhibition of his Roman sketches. A retrospective of his watercolors was held at Yale’s Koerner Center in 2017, and in the spring of 2024 the Yale School of Architecture presented an exhibition of his watercolors and travel sketchbooks.
Purves received his design training at the Yale School of Architecture, graduating in 1965 with the degree of Master of Architecture. After ten years as a practicing architect in New York City with the firm of Davis, Brody & Associates, he joined the Yale faculty in 1976. Having coordinated and taught design studios at all levels in the School of Architecture, Purves currently restricts his teaching to “Introduction to Architecture”, an undergraduate course open to any student in the University. For fourteen years he taught an intensive drawing seminar in Rome for graduate architecture students. He has also led many Yale Educational Travel programs in Italy, France and the British Isles as well as Eastern Europe, the Turkish coast, Egypt and Japan