Alex Uxbridge

'Human kind cannot bear...'  Oils on Canvas.  137 by 104 cms.  £3000.

Alex Uxbridge writes:

“ Painting is a process of illusion – the illusion that paint is a real image, a beautiful image, but ultimately it is still paint. I want to see that”.

"Some artists still seem to find it exciting to endlessly question the nature of what art is. I don’t particularly.

Maybe because I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth - into an aristocratic family, growing up at the Anglesey Stately Home, Plas Newydd and recently inheriting the title, Marquess of Anglesey - maybe because of the lucky privilege of being securely attached to a place and a history, I haven’t been driven to carve out a niche of (probably spurious) originality.

For me, it’s far more interesting to search for a fresh personal response to what I see around me - including the beautiful landscape of Anglesey and Snowdonia - using, mainly, very traditional means.

Introduction by Jan Morris.

So do these pictures seem to me when I view them in recollection - simplicity tainted, or spiced, with ambiguity. And when I return to view them actually on the wall, it is precisely their ambiguity that fascinates me. Fresh their colours certainly do look, when I inspect them again, sweetly pastoral are the rural scenes, excitingly metropolitan Piccadilly and Trafalfar Square.  It is easy to think of Alex Uxbridge then as a straightforward traditionalist, simply observing the world. But presently that other truth reveals itself, and I am entangled by the strangeness of his subltle art.
In my mind then the mountain shadows pervade the pictures, I discover touches of the grotesque or even the sinister within these frames, and it occurs to me that the minute silent fisherman just to be detected on the shores of Red Wharf Bay, alone in the empty winds beside a cold, cold sea - that melancholy figure may perhaps be you or me.