Current art exhibit
Library Portrait Project – Drawings by Alex Kanevsky – August & September 2026
For a long while now I have been making drawings of my friends, people I know casually or sometimes not at all. This is different from just paintings of people, something I also do. Models are there to embody a story or an idea, while a portrait is driven by the personality of the sitter and the kind of relationship we develop as two humans in a room, as we work on it.
Nobody expects it to be very meaningful. Just make the person look like herself and furrow the brow to show her depth, then add a moody glint in the eye, and you’re done. Nobody is walking around and saying bitter things about social justice, nobody quotes Walter Benjamin, or tries to deconstruct your gender identity. It is what it is. You hang it on a wall.
When you try to do portraits of actual people several problems surface immediately. The first one could be called the Mother Theresa problem: It is hard enough to love a person, but try loving any and all of them. I have not resolved this, so I can only attempt drawing portraits of people I know and love. Or at least like.
Secondly, you realize that even though it looks like the person, the person is not there. The shell does not reflect the soul, and the soul is invisible. But when it is present, it can be felt. And the only way to put it there is to use the presence of soul as a necessary rule, as in chess: if you don’t follow the rules – it is not chess.
So here we go. The library, where this show will take place, is above all, the librarians. Books too, but that’s similar in any library. Every library has its own personality. This is Cook Library, and its presence in the world is defined by Mary, Peggy, Amy, Nina, Polly, Lucy, Chris and Hollis. Together their portraits make the portrait of the Library.
Biography
Alex Kanevsky was born in 1963 in what was called at the time, the Soviet Union. He studied mathematics at Vilnius University in Lithuania before coming to the United States. After his arrival to Philadelphia in 1983 he worked as a Russian translator, an illustrator at the Psychiatric Nursing Magazine and drew pictures for the Yellow Pages advertisements. After attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1989-93) and winning a Pew Fellowship (1997) he devoted himself to painting full time. Alex Kanevsky lives and works in New Hampshire with his wife Hollis Heichemer who has been volunteering in this library for more than 20 years. He has exhibited his work in the United States, Canada, Italy, UK, France, Spain, Ireland, Mexico and Japan.