DRAWINGS
Early years & Family life
Alper was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York in 1959; she was the second of four children, and the only girl. When she was age two, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she has lived ever since. As a child, Alper had a phobia of touching others and of being touched, for fear that her touch was poisonous. By age four or five, she was drawing prolifically, and she found that drawing relieved her anxiety.
edges of the mind
“If Alper’s childhood was difficult, her teen-age years were even worse. “I was very depressed during that period of my life and contemplated suicide constantly,” says Alper, who continued to make a prodigious amount of artwork during those years.”
Art became even more important to Alper in 1986 when she had the major breakdown that had been building up since her childhood and she lost the ability to speak or write. Hospitalized for several months, she used drawing as the primary means of communicating with friends and therapists, who looked to her artwork as a valuable diagnostic tool.- LA Times
DIPPING INTO THE SUBCONSCIOUS
Alper’s personality is marked by a self-effacing humor and charming guilelessness that combine with the grave sadness on her face in a manner that’s quite compelling. A gracious hostess who is eager to be accommodating, she nonetheless shows her work with modesty and embarrassment. “I can count the number of times I’ve shown my work on Django Reinhardt’s hand,” she shyly quips.
OTHER DRAWINGS
From CD
