Alex Spalding: On Seeing, Becoming, and the Wild Side
September 8th, 2026

Alex Spalding is an established painter with a distinctive visual language who is deliberately testing the boundaries of what a painter can be. His work begins with his attraction to images and follows that attraction into stranger territory. His ongoing Wild Side series—portraits of women accompanied by animals, masks, and other transformational imagery—brings together graphic design, popular imagery, expressive painting, and an expanding interest in the sacred feminine.

But the work resists settling comfortably into any one category. Spalding is interested in beauty, but also in the suspicion surrounding beauty; in femininity, but in forms of femininity that exceed convention; in desire, without wanting to reduce desire to possession. The animals in Wild Side are deliberately left somewhat unexplained. His paintings can be read through feminism, Jungian archetypes, spirituality, pop culture, or questions of perception and authorship, but Spalding is wary of insisting that the viewer follow him down every rabbit hole. As he puts it, “My interests can be labyrinthine.”

That refusal to close things down extends into his thinking about the artist. Spalding increasingly questions the necessity of the artist’s hand, embracing AI and other forms of direction and collaboration as ways of asking where an artwork actually resides—and where the artist resides within it. At the same time, he remains emphatically a painter, describing the “painter” as less a particular method of manufacture than as a way of looking at the world.

Running through the conversation is a recurring concern with integration: high and low, masculine and feminine, human and animal, instinct and intellect, visibility and freedom, tradition and technological possibility. Spalding calls this impulse a syzygia—the bringing of disparate things into a relationship.

What follows is less an explanation of the work than a glimpse into the strange machinery behind it: the memories, attractions, contradictions, ambitions, questions, and intuitions that keep bringing him back to the canvas.

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What drew you toward women as a subject?

Alex Spalding: I think that genuinely caring about women, as a man, is a form of self-love. I think to honor and respect women and femininity leads to greater integration, both of the self and of society. The more we cling to separations, the more fractured we become.

There's a lot about men that I struggle with. My focus on women has become one way of investigating this.

I take pleasure in seeing, thinking, feeling, and loving. That's why I paint, and why my work is shaped by ideas around womanhood and the alluring qualities of visual art. These are easy to integrate.

I also reflect how, as a teen, I was a lot more extreme and transgressive, very angry and antagonistically androgynous in a culture that was hostile toward women and queer identities. I was on the streets all the time as a result. There's a deep rift between me and the idea of home. That's something else I've had to integrate, and far more of a challenge.

That's the hierogamic principle I've spoken about elsewhere: integrating highs and lows, seeking a spiritual dimension between the two where there can be union. So in my images, there is beauty, transgression, and restraint.

For about fifteen years now I've been far less concerned with ‘being,’ and far more interested in creating. I've come to think men are made through a process of making deliberate and repetitive choices about their existence, aligning them with what they perceive to be their highest principles and motivations, which for me are aesthetic. However, there is something sacred about my hardest experiences that my work draws from, too.

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You've described art as a relationship with yourself. Is authenticity the same kind of relationship?

Spalding: Yes. I do feel that Art is a relationship I have with myself, and I would add that authenticity is also a relationship I have with myself.

I see a lot of conversations online about authenticity, which seem to circle around an external perception of authenticity. I ask, what's anyone else got to do with my authenticity?

But the two ideas, art and realness, are very close. I am frequently transforming myself, sometimes completely changing my physical appearance around, and considering what it means when we feel uncomfortable about transitions in life, or in our bodies.

Making art has both modified and brought form to who I am, if not always externally, certainly internally.

I opted to embrace a retreat into invisibility for several years which gave me more freedom of movement and enabled me to work on things like music or writing with less interference from the world around me.

Eventually, being unseen becomes its own problem.

—

You talk about beauty as something more complicated than surface attractiveness. What does beauty mean to you?

Spalding: Beauty is complicated. It can be surface, but there is more to it.

I think of the way wine can be. In wine, sophistication and high quality is associated with complexity. In many of the highest quality wines, you find incongruous notes, which aren't flaws but integral aspects of the beauty of the experience.

I have a memory of sharing wine with a friend and discussing how Barolo can have signature notes of tar and roses. He said, “That sounds disgusting!” But it's part of what makes a great Barolo so appealing, really beautiful to me.

I find a similar thread of complex incongruity in fragrances I love, going back to the lineage of leather fragrances that are my most beloved, which have been a part of rebellious and feminine American subcultures since Chanel released Cuir de Russie in the 1920s. Bandit, Cabochard, and so on, with their tar-heavy profile.

Some might perceive my painting as Beaujolais-Nouveau, but I view it more like Manzanilla. It's light, but there's a depth behind it, a solera structure into which I'm always bringing new into the old, and contradiction, things like graphic design flatness, expression, and texture.

And, perhaps I'm the ocean outside blessing the mixture with my salt?

This is what I really do, stretch analogies.

There is a suspicion of beauty among some artists. It could be a suspicion of art itself in another guise. Still, [their] work offers a window into other ways of thought and I appreciate that. Often, works critical of beauty are interesting, too.

—

Why animals?

Spalding: I'm not keen to really explain the animals so much. I've spent an enormous amount of time considering them from multiple angles and they may be exhausted with my analyzations. I'm bound to be eaten if I continue.

Their presence has been instinctual, from the very first work in the series, and I would likely not be painting them at all if it weren't for their unique relationships to the women in the paintings.

This leads me to conclude there is some special form of manifestation involved.

—

You've described the work as a way of exploring desire. Does painting allow you to explore desire while leaving the subject free?

Spalding: That's really a great question.

Desire is human. I believe an autonomous, self-directed being will still crave intimacy, have desires and appetites, and my grasping of this is that acceptance is the answer to the mystery.

I speak of certain subjects as compulsions or obsessions in my art, and I'm not backing away from that, but I think there are simply things that grab me. Visual art gives me a place to put those things and investigate what they might mean.

The display gives us all a chance to talk about it, and sometimes that's all it needs to be.

I haven't had very many issues around this point, as my work has been accepted and appreciated by women I've met in the arts who've become my most inspiring and supportive colleagues and friends. That's an incredible gift. In relationships, it is amazing working with someone else to fulfill a mutual desire.

I find that my open attitude about adopting AI as a fundamental component of my art practice has been far more controversial.

—

You've used the phrase “sacred feminine.” What does it mean to you?

Spalding: I arrived here very incidentally. It's a revelatory investigation that began when I commissioned a writer, ShaVaughn Elle, to write a brief editorial about my work. She linked my paintings to Jungian archetypes, via the analyses of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

Before this, I was painting women intuitively, working backward from memories of childhood, navigating strange retail spaces where certain things had me transfixed: masks, models, monstrous feminine figures, women in magazines, film or album covers.

Once I got started with Wild Side, I gathered thousands of images to deepen the conceptual field I was working within.

Receiving that additional link she’d built from my singular feminine images to both the collective unconscious and a spiritual dimension broadened the scope of the artistic inquiry considerably. I began seeing common threads running throughout the work.

What makes the feminine sacred is something I've found several answers to, but it can't be denied that it's fundamental to many religions and spiritual inclinations.

I'm painting women as highly individualistic, but incorporating transformational imagery that communicates archetypes, connections with primal nature, liberation and strength, spiritual truths.

I think of myself as feminism-adjacent, doing my own thing with all of these influences.

—

You mentioned the “monstrous feminine.” Are you drawn to a femininity that exceeds conventional categories?

Spalding: Yes. I think there is aesthetic beauty in all expressions of femininity.

I work with an expanded femininity, which is why I paint challenging women, women who are fierce, women with facial tattoos, trans women, drag queens.

It's about encountering women where they are. Even in great struggles there is aesthetic beauty.

Women have been contained for too long. There is a golden vastness to womanhood beneath the surface of what's deemed acceptable by convention.

My thought is that the world is a lovely, miraculous paradise filled with people who refuse to see it, and integration helps unlock the truth.

—

Is Wild Side, in some sense, also a self-portrait?

Spalding: Yes, philosophically, my work about women is also a portrayal of my inner life. I don't identify myself as a woman, but I do identify with women.

I think my work with women as a subject is, in part, an attempt to find a mutual, radical liberation from constraints.

I've been connecting with many incredible women in the arts, building and expanding and sharing opportunities with them through curation and mutual aid.

—

You've described your work as containing “compound meanings.” How much does the viewer need to know?

Spalding: I don't know that it's very important that anyone has access to that when standing in front of the work. Interpretation is a very private thing. I can't resolve what others are going to bring to the work when viewing.

My work can be misunderstood, but it often isn't.

Most of what I've been describing is the motor driving the work.

I divide my practice into three parts: my visual lexicon, which incorporates techniques and formal elements drawn from the commercial design world; the form I work in, which I refer to as a kind of prosoponic portraiture; and the subject, women or the sacred feminine. Each of these facets are apertures into further mysteries.

Personally, I go down so many different rabbit holes I couldn't expect a viewer to follow me.

My interests can be labyrinthine.

—

When someone encounters one of your paintings in person, what do you actually want them to feel?

Spalding: When I began painting some years ago, I felt that it was important to make an impact on an emotional level. The work is effective in that regard, and I enjoy hearing others share their feelings about a piece they have seen and appreciate.

At this point, perhaps because the work has succeeded in that dimension, I've taken a few steps back from emphasizing impact, and trust the paintings to do what they do.

This frees me to place my emphasis on the subject, concepts, and discovery.

—

You're a man making beautiful, sensual images of women while also speaking strongly about women's autonomy and liberation. What do you think about the tension around the male gaze?

Spalding: I've encountered that tension outside the confines of my art practice, it seems to be a continually evolving dialectic within the body of feminist thought.

I can't tell a woman how to feel about my images, which are all just a part of the larger conversation.

I've asked myself whether this body of work is simply ‘male gaze.’ I don't believe it is. I feel that's too reductionist.

My work is restrained, probably as a matter of my taste. But, I also don't deliberately avoid male gaze, either. The tension there isn't something I will resolve.

—

You've said that you may not need to physically make the art anymore. What, then, is the essential function of the artist?

Spalding: It's always been the artist's mind, how they see, that has shaped the value of their work.

I think Modern Art really highlighted this facet of our understanding of Art beautifully. Artists during the Modern period, in which photography had begun replacing realism, had an astonishing amount to tell us about how we see the world, mostly through devices like perspective or optics.

I'm investigating a more subjective field of inquiry through Art: an investigation into why I see or notice, what I feel about seeing, and broader questions regarding the agency of sight and how this is communicated clearly between individuals via the medium of Art and direction, or prompting.

Traditional Art will never become obsolete, but it's romantic, valued for other reasons. Traditional, grounded painting with familiar themes and subjects will always have a market.

I’m going in other directions. Traditionalist painting isn't where I'm interested in making my contribution. My aim is to break new ground for others to fill after me.

—

Where does that leave the physical act of making?

Spalding: If I had to place it, I think that the Art is only in me, and it arrives as I arrive at new vantages.

I think about what it took to present the first ready-made, or fill a gallery with Brillo boxes. I seek a similar radical break from all assumptions regarding Art and its creation.

We are more liberated as artists than we have ever been, and we need to use our newfound freedom to form radical breaks from every last vestige of narrative surrounding Art and its creation.

There is no telling where that path leads, but I find it exciting. My development as an artist has increasingly been a process of letting go of control and surrendering.

This is partly why I'm so fond of AI. I would love to build something like an orchestra of painters to execute a work on canvas designed by AI.

I'm not concerned where the Art resides, but where I reside, as a painter and artist.

What is my essential function? I may claim to be as useless as Art itself.

—

What would you most like to be able to do that you can't yet?

Alex Spalding: I'm advancing my work in scale, establishing effective collaborative networks, and expanding freedom as an artist, [these] are the huge ones for me.

I can't tell you any specifics about the future, except that I am pursuing expansion and taking risks that move my practice toward unknowns.

I will always view myself as a painter, as it is an accurate description of my way of looking at things and is an identity I feel I partly chose and partly received inexplicably at a very early age.

I don't know what I can't do at this juncture, however.

When I have an idea I like, I pursue it.

—

You've spoken openly about wanting success and wealth. What are you actually after?

Spalding: It's definitely money.

Greater financial freedom expands the range of possibilities for me and my art, and opens up enticing possibilities for philanthropy. I want enough success to realize the full breadth of my vision.

—

After everything we've discussed, what do you think you're really trying to discover through all of this?

Spalding: Art has a lot to say to us, about us.

I'm making meaning out of my life, pulling together all the things that come to my attention, the things that matter to me, and bringing them toward some destination of complete syzygia.

I get a sense the destination is just one leg of a larger journey, in art, communication, and philosophy.

—

Afterword

After spending this much time with Alex Spalding, I’m left with the impression that Wild Side is less a body of paintings than a field of inquiry.

The obvious subjects are women and animals. But those subjects keep opening onto other questions: beauty and its complications, desire and autonomy, masculinity and femininity, the sacred and the vulgar, instinct and intellect, visibility and freedom. Spalding has a tendency to pull things apart only to put them back into relationship with one another. He calls that impulse syzygia, and by the end of our conversation it seems less like a theoretical concept than a description of how he thinks.

What interests me most is that he doesn't seem particularly interested in resolving these tensions.

He wants to make beautiful paintings, while acknowledging the suspicion that surrounds beauty. He is interested in femininity without attempting to define it. He paints animals but refuses to explain them. He speaks openly about desire without reducing it to possession. He wants visibility, but remembers the freedom of disappearing. He wants to make great paintings, while increasingly questioning whether the artist needs to physically make them at all.

These contradictions don't strike me as problems to be solved. They are where the energy is.

There is also something unusual about the relationship between Spalding's intellectual life and the paintings themselves. His interests can become extraordinarily elaborate—Jungian archetypes, the sacred feminine, graphic design, perfume, wine, AI, Modernism, perception, technology, spirituality. But the paintings don't necessarily ask the viewer to know any of this. In fact, I suspect they become more interesting when they don't.

Spalding's thinking is labyrinthine. The work doesn't have to be.

That may be one of the most important things for him to trust. The images already possess a directness that can carry much more ambiguity than an artist statement usually permits. There is something seductive in them, and then something strange. Something familiar, and then something difficult to categorize. They can be erotic, funny, beautiful, unsettling, spiritual, commercial, primitive, sophisticated—and occasionally several of these things at once.

The temptation, for an artist with this much to say, would be to explain.

Because underneath all of the theories and references, I think there is a simpler and more compelling proposition at work: that making art can be a way of continually becoming.

And perhaps that is why the conversation ultimately becomes less about Wild Side than about what comes next.

He doesn't know what he can't do.

There is ambition here—real ambition, including the desire for money, scale, technological freedom, collaboration, and a much larger audience. But there is also a refusal to pretend that success will constitute an endpoint. Even syzygia, the idea of bringing disparate things into relation, doesn't finally resolve into a destination.

So I don't think I would conclude by telling you what Alex Spalding's work means.

I'd rather leave you with the same uncertainty he seems increasingly comfortable leaving his viewers with.