The following is an Excerpt from a artist Bio that was publish at the Stage 1 Gallery opening in 2011-

 

Les Alexandrea was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York in the cultural hotbed of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.For Les, art is more than just a calling, it's a family tradition. His father, also an artist, had number of pieces featured in galleries in NYC in the 1970s. His grandfather was a a well-respected studio musician who played on recordings as diverse as Motown and Elvis. And his younger sister is likewise an artist with a large following in the anime community.

 

Les has cited a number of influences in his work, including the abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman, the great impressionist Claude Monet, portrait artist Chuck Close, and comic artists Jim Lee and Frank Miller. Outside of art, he is a self-professed tech junkie who enjoys fixing and reassembling computers. He has even parlayed this into his art by incorporating digital coloration and penciling techniques into his work.

 

Although Les is largely self-taught, he has been trained in a number of types of studio art, including painting, photography, and figure and still-life drawing. He has worked in a number of mediums including oil pastels, pencil, sculpture in the form of ceramic busts, he has created art for websites and tried his hand at web design and is currently working on pieces with colored pencils and even crayons. He has done designing for local hip-hop artists and has even stretched his talents as far as creating totem poles. His specialty, however, is charcoal portraits, most often of the figures of hip-hop that have long been an influence on his work. Other subjects that have cropped up in his work regularly include figures from comic book art and more experimental, abstract portraits. 

 

Written by- Dennin Liam Elis