Alexander Rouse

Alexander Rouse is an artist, designer, and writer from South Carolina. His work was influenced from an early age by the natural world, religious iconography, and a deep curiosity for any art around him. After receiving a degree in graphic design, Alexander has pivoted to a more studio-focused practice, working on building stability as a fine artist and expanding his work to new dimensions. As a designer, he has received awards from the American Advertising Federation, and as an artist Alexander has exhibited in a number of galleries, received publication, and created client work across multiple applications.

Alexander bears a hereditary link to Southern culture and natural identity. His art is shaped by this history and the complex systems and personalities that come with it. In tandem with the agrarian lives of his ancestors, Alexander’s art takes a naturalistic focus, centering subjects of the natural world and objectifying those subjects in a narrative context. His work invites questions of selfhood, inheritance, and metanarrative, and cornerstone of his practice is a deep rooting in classical references, religious aesthetics, and semiotic materialism. His focus is water-based painting, with strong emphasis on illustration and draftsmanship. Additional mediums include cyanotype, assemblage, and pyrography. He takes special interest in combining familiar methodology with unusual materials—wood-burning into bone, cyanotype on wood, paintings as assemblage.