Alex Box

Alex Box by Rankin, Photographer. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780956315502.

In an industry with many imitators and few originators, visionary makeup artist, Alex Box, and prolific photographer Rankin have collaborated to produce a truly unique oeuvre. Alex Box draws together 40 colour portraits in which two artists at the pinnacle of their professions. Alex Box is Creative Director for makeup brand, Illamasqua. As such, she has worked with some of the most experimental and avant garde designers, photographers, and hair stylists in the fashion industry. She is nothing less than a master of colour, detail and form; never viewing her models face as a limitation but rather as a canvas with no boundary. In Alex Box, she weaves the most surreal and outlandish of creative concepts into and around the features of her muses, morphing them into divine otherworldly creatures. Alex Boxs touch is alternately garish and lurid, then deliberate and considered; a splurge of rainbow colour, then soberly monochrome; sweeping and brazen, then calculated and graphic. Further working over the images once printed ― using pen and ink, crayon, collage, oil paint ― each becomes an individual work of art, standing alone in its own right. Rankins 22- year career is evident in his sensitive lighting and composition, which confidently compliments and captures the essence of each idea, never shouting over the mood of the image, but instead gently realising the portrait in all its subtleties and complexities. The result is a collection of hauntingly beautiful and visually stunning images ― art and artistry in its highest form