Alexander Artis-Cordiner

Alexander Artis-Cordiner (b. 1995, Aurora, CO) is an artist currently based in Denver. He has been tattooing in Colorado since 2014, and has shown his drawings and paintings in group and solo exhibitions.

Through his work, Artis-Cordiner uses the brilliance of light with shadow and the transient motion of time to convey a blurring of dream and memory, and reveal the intense beauty of the ordinary, the routine, and the everyday. His focus is on painting items commonly found in inner-city life that are made of hard materials such as porcelain, metal, and stone, often bathing his subjects in soft ambient, natural light. This invites the viewer into a hazy memory of some perfect morning, a late afternoon, or any moment when the bluish shadows of the earth and the warm golden rays of the sun will dance upon our hardened environment, and we will have found some quiet happiness in the place we call our home.

Artis-Cordiner’s fascination with humans, cities, architecture , sculpture, and painting (both ancient and modern) comes from his family, and especially his father’s parents (Norma Cordiner d. 2018,William S. Cordiner d. 2013) who were both working artists and a sculpture professor at UNC Greeley for 29 years. They both were collectors of things, and so from a young age, Artis-Cordiner was immersed in fine art and books on Gothic art motifs, the Impressionists and their art, and many more, all of which have influenced his work to this day. The relationship and opposition between ancient and modern , hard and soft, rough and smooth, warm and cool, liquid and solid, light and shadow, inside-outside are all subjects of Artis-Cordiner’s work to communicate the balance of fast-paced life and working in the city. He touches on the feeling of loneliness in a crowded place, how and where we are able find solace in the West, and the affects an environment can have on one’s general mood and thinking patterns.