Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade
Meade in the self-portrait Double Take
Born	1986 (age 30–31) Washington, D.C.
Nationality	American
Education	Vassar College
Known for	Installation art, painting, photography
Website	alexameade.com

Alexa Meade (born 1986) is an American installation artist best known for her portraits painted directly onto the human body and inanimate objects in a way that collapses depth and makes her models appear two-dimensional when photographed. What remains is "a photo of a painting of a person, and the real person hidden somewhere underneath." She takes a classical concept — trompe l'oeil, the art of making a two-dimensional representational painting look like a real three-dimensional space — and turns it on its head by doing the opposite, making real life appear to be a painting.

Meade was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 2009, with a bachelor's degree in political science. Initially planning on a path in politics, she interned for congressmen and senators on Capitol Hill, and then worked as a press assistant on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. She decided to become a professional artist in 2009, teaching herself how to paint while inventing her signature style.

Meade's Living Paintings series is a collection of portraits painted directly onto models, using acrylic paints to make the three-dimensional subjects appear two-dimensional. Only the unpainted parts – typically the hair and eyes – reveal “an optical illusion that blurs the lines of where reality ends and art begins.” The work combines painting, photography, art installations and performance art.

In April 2009, at Vassar College, Meade began to experiment with the idea of putting paint on top of shadows. She then realized while painting the shadows and highlights on the body of her friend Bernie, she could make the three-dimensional space appear two-dimensional. After graduation, she honed her painting technique in her parent's Washington, D.C. basement by practicing painting on inanimate objects like grapefruits, fried eggs and sausage. She has credited her lack of formal art training with allowing her to come up with unique ideas of surfaces she could paint on, since she didn't think of painting as something that necessarily had to be done on a canvas.

Meade first gained public recognition in March 2010, when her living paintings went viral following a short post about her work on Jason Kottke's blog kottke.org. She soon received coverage on CNN and elsewhere. Her website went from having negligible views to an estimated 30,000 page views the next day. Her most famous artwork at the time, "Transit," features an older man Meade painted on in her basement studio, and then photographed riding the Washington, D.C. metro, looking "as if a painting from the National Portrait Gallery has leapt off its wall to go walking through the flesh-and-blood world." Her speech at the 2013 TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, "Your Body is my Canvas," offers a behind the scenes look at her work, and details her career beginnings. She has named installation artist Robert Irwin as an inspiration, citing his biography, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, as an influence on how she thinks about the perception of space.