8th and Olive, downtown Los Angeles Print

Alex Schaefer was born in Los Angeles, California and still resides there to this day. He lives and works in his downtown L.A. studio and is an active fixture in L.A.’s contemporary art scene. He can be found quite often with his easel on the sidewalks of the bustling downtown city streets painting en plein-air street scenes often depicting many of the historical buildings located in and around the downtown area. With his outgoing personality he is one with the city where he lives and paints. 

 Keeping abreast of current events in the news, he is not shy about including controversial and artistic satire into his paintings and often expresses his views onto the canvas. During the great American recession starting in 2008, Alex gained international notoriety for his politically charged symbolic plein-air paintings depicting banks on fire. 

 Alex studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and is now a teacher there. His main influences are the early French Impressionists and San Francisco Bay area figurative and abstract artists of the 1950’s. His oeuvre is wide ranging from traditional plein-air landscapes, cityscapes and street scenes to figurative nudes, portraits and abstract paintings.