Portrait photography by Jackie Alpers Acacia Alder pauses before a backdrop of one of her colorful paintings.

“I remember the woods,” Acacia Alder recalls of a childhood spent climbing trees in rural Ohio. When she moved with her husband and two daughters to Tucson in the early 1970s, Alder brought her deep love for the natural world with her. In time, that affection led to her art: brilliant canvases of eye-popping color filled with striking nature imagery.  

Once she experienced the expansive beauty of the Sonoran Desert, Alder knew where she belonged. “I was completely drawn to the desert,” she relates. Before long, she began to make jewelry, an art she pursued for many years before turning to painting. “Many of my relatives were craftspeople,” she says of a family of woodworkers and furniture makers. Alder cites another artistic influence: her mother, a collector of antiques who had a “strong decorative eye.”
 
Despite the artist’s love for the desert, those early walks in the Ohio woods continued to haunt her. “I could still see the yellow violets, the trillium and the other wildflowers,” she confides. Alder adored the beautifully tended flowers of her parents’ gardens, but the plants of the open field truly “grabbed” her heart. “Wild grasses, thistles, great tangles of barbs and berries—memories of the wilderness called me,” she reminisces.

Set against a background of green hills, and defined by clusters of slender white trunks, the fiery-colored leaves of tree canopies appear to shimmer in Canopy of Light, an acrylic on canvas measuring 48" x 72".

Although Alder was unaware of it when she moved to Tucson, her artistic endeavors were following the same path, slowly drawing her back to nature. She began to hike frequently, especially through Arizona’s riparian areas and conservancies. And she had the gnawing feeling that she needed another outlet to express the “rhythms and spirit” of her natural surroundings. 

In 1992, Alder’s desire for a “larger canvas” led her to study two-dimensional art in classes in pastels at the Drawing Studio in Tucson. “At first, I only exhibited in pastels,” she points out. However, a class in acrylic painting taught by Tucson artist Jim Waid opened a new world for her. She embraced the rapid drying quality of acrylic paints. “I do a lot of layering,” she explains, “and I like it to dry quickly so I can go over it.” Her painterly approach  often leads to “fast change and improvisation,” also made easier with quick-drying acrylics.
    
As a studio artist, Alder works mostly from photographs she snaps and sketches she makes during her walks. “My photographs are a reminder of what I experience when I’m out in nature,” she says. Once in the studio, she transfers what she has seen into her own chromatic vision, an approach heavily influenced by such Post-Impressionists as Cézanne, van Gogh and Bonnard. She discovered another inspiration in Canada’s Group of Seven, a gathering of landscape painters from the 1920s. “They had that intimate relationship with nature,” she offers.  

“I also love the Fauves and their wild interpretation of color,” adds Alder in a nod to her own vibrant color sense. She employs a palette of complementary colors to achieve the glimmering quality of her works. “I love it when people respond to the colors—I want the paintings to feel alive,” she comments, noting that she strives for “a strong sense of movement” from the color play in her pieces.