Rising Stars: Meet Alexi Grojean of Wheat Ridge

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alexi Grojean.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
For me the decision to pursue my art career started floating on a raft through the Grand Canyon. I’d taken three weeks off for this trip, and so had all my best friends. Just the 16 of us cruising through one of the most beautiful place in America. It was somewhere in the middle of that trip that a friend started talking to me about his time teaching English abroad. He said that I was perfect for that kind of adventure, and that I would love every moment of it. I didn’t think much of it, as I had a graphic design job and saw it as my foothold into a career as a graphic designer.

But sometimes life throws you a fork in the river.

When I turned my phone on for the first time in two and a half weeks, I was greeted with countless text messages, and one voicemail. My boss, who I loved, and still love to this day, had some very bad news. She explained in the voice mail how she had decided to fold the company while I was on the river. I was out of a job, but I could keep my a brand new computer. The life that I thought I had planned out had just floated down the river.

I took the next month and a half off to figure out what I was going to do next. I spent the first week at the bars, but realized that being there was going to do me no good, and that I had to leave for a while to find myself, and find where my life would flow next. I drove out of Durango, Colorado, early on a Sunday morning to drive to Teton National Forest. Three weeks later I found myself driving into Seattle, Washington.

Along that journey I talked with many people, and journaled every thought I had. I kept finding myself thinking about traveling abroad for a year to teach English. If I didn’t take that opportunity now, I didn’t think it would ever happen again.

It took weeks to drive to Seattle, and a day and a half to drive back to Durango. I immediately worked on getting my TEFL (teaching english as a foreign language) qualification, and started interviewing with companies around the world. I found a school in Russia that seemed like a perfect fit, and the interview with them went really well. They only had one bad thing to say: I needed at least a year or two of experience and then they would be happy to hire me. Go to Japan, Korea, or China, they said. It’s the best way to get experience, and they are always hiring.

A couple months later I was packing my bags for China. I ended up living in a city called Yinchuan. I moved there in February of 2019 on a year and half contract. It was during my time there that everything shifted, not just in my career and life, but how I started to create my art.

11 months after I’d arrived, I was in the back of a taxi with a Chinese friend, and she asked if I had heard of a disease that was starting to spread around the country.

A few weeks later I found myself in a complete lockdown in a foreign country with an unknown illness spreading around the world. I had nothing to do all day, and would spend hours on social media. I had my sketchbook and pens and would draw, but there is only so much time in the day that you can draw. One day while on social media I saw a video of someone drawing on an iPad, and I was intrigued. After some research, I realized that this might be a fun way to work on my drawings.

Since middle school, I’ve been making a very specific style of drawing. In art school in Durango, I tried creating what I saw in my head with traditional painting methods, water color, pen and ink, and even photoshop and Illustrator, but I could never get the results that I really wanted. Watercolor wasn’t bold enough, Photoshop was too rigid. So I bought an iPad, bought the software Procreate and I sat down with it during that first lockdown to give it a try.

It was within the first hour of using this new medium that I knew I had what I had been looking for all this time. I could blend precision and looseness, add textures, manipulate color, and work in layers. It was a dream come true. I started drawing obsessively between teaching classes. Students, kids between two and ten, would gather around me while I created, and they would always ask, “what’s this?!” and I would always reply, “I don’t know” (in Chinese, of course) and it would drive them crazy! I don’t know if they had ever been exposed to abstract art before.

So I drew and drew. I created dozens of pieces, each one bringing me more and more joy, as I mastered Procreate. I would sit for hours on the weekends at cafes and bars, and just draw. It always drew people to look over my shoulder, and they would ask, “What is it?” and I would always answer, “I don’t know.”

Creating the artwork wasn’t ever about showing it to the world. I started an Instagram page, but it was more for sharing art with my friends and family than the world in general. I wasn’t trying to build a following or even sell anything. I was creating for the pure joy of making these pieces of art I had wanted to create since I was a child.

The pieces I was trying to make in college unsuccessfully were these shapes that I had “discovered” in middle school. I remember the exact moment that I had accidentally drawn one. It was in the middle of class and I was always doodling on the margins of notebooks, and I drew this shape with many sides that seemed to morph into itself. I loved it the second I saw it, and I drew it over and over. I soon learned what it was that I liked about how the shape was formed and learned how to make more and different ones. You could make them go on forever if you wanted.

My father was an abstract artist. He created fantastic abstract paintings, and was always working on a new technique to push his work. I would sit in his art studio as a child and just look at his quick drawings. He was like me when it came to taking notes. There would be about 4 or 5 lines of notes, and the rest of the page would be doodles. He would always add a little zing to his drawings, and I loved those zings. So naturally the zings made it into my own work.

I continued to draw these abstract, colorful, energetic pieces in China. I moved to a new city, Xi’an, made new friends, and they would eventually see what I was working on and always say how much they loved the work I was making. I enjoyed Xi’an, and I thought I would stay there for a long time, but life’s river had class five rapid sneaking up on me, and it came out of nowhere.

The troubles started when in late October, when I got a call from my sister, telling me that our father had suffered from a stroke. He was in the hospital and was having trouble with speech and memory. It was a very long week for me, as I got daily updates, and I considered moving back to the States for the first time in a very long time.

You see, I wasn’t allowed to come and visit my family in the States and just go back to my life in China. At that time, due to Covid, the only people allowed to go back into China were Chinese people themselves. So If I was going to come and visit with my dad in the hospital, it was going to come with a full move back to the States.

Two months after my dad had his stroke, I was sitting in a bar with my friends, when we all started to get updates on the city of Xi’an, my new home. Photos of hundreds of people lined up in white suits and masks started to be sent around. Thousands of police officers gathering, vans and buses taking up entire highways. Covid was making its way around the city, and the city was not having it.

I don’t know how I made it back to my apartment, but somehow I was able to get probably one of the last taxis in the city. I made it into my apartment and knew that I was about to go through yet another lockdown. I made sure to charge my iPad before going to bed that night.

Stuck in my apartment, I continued to draw. I drew some of my favorite pieces during that lockdown, which ended up being much more serious than the first one. This time, I ran out of water, and I nearly ran out of food. I would send friends photos of the food I had left and they would come up with recipes for me to follow and make a halfway decent meal. Every morning at 7am I would have to go to the bottom of my building and submit a Covid test, along with all 13 million people in the city. Every test would go into the same test vial, and they would test the entire building all at once. If it came back positive they would come back through, do individual tests, find the sick people, and ship them out of the city.

Luckily I was never put into a van and shipped out of the city. I wonder if I had, would I have been permitted to take my iPad, and what kind of art would I have made there?!

It was in the middle of this lockdown that I received news that a major fire had started near Boulder, Colorado, my hometown. I was soon bombarded with footage of fires raging out of control. One video in particular, from an airplane, I will never forget. It seemed like fires were engulfing my entire home. For two days I thought Boulder had burned to the ground. It was during that time, that I decided when this lockdown ended I would move back home.

By February of 2022, I was back in America, and I was back with my family. I spent lots of time with my dad, back in his art studio, but for some reason I didn’t really ever show him the art I was making. I think I felt like he might think I was going in competition with him, which now feels silly. I think he would have been quite supportive, and might have had a few good critiques of my art. But I never showed him my work.

It was a few months later, that my father received news that the art studio he had been renting since the early 90s was going to increase his rent. The owner of the building had passed away, and his family saw how much he had been charging my father, and they felt it was way too little. So my father got notice that his rent was going to quadruple, and he decided to get out of dodge.

He decided to move to San Antonio, where his brother lives, and he was going to build a little art studio in the backyard of my uncle’s place, with a little bedroom above it. So my sister and I packed up all his artwork into a 1992 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon, and I drove my father all the way to San Antonio. I’m so happy I got those few days with him, because they would be the last time I saw my father in person.

My father died in his car, in the middle of San Antonio, of a stroke. It happened while I was at Burning Man. The last time I talked to him I was waiting in line to enter the festival. He died without any ID, so the authorities didn’t know who he was, so they didn’t know who to get in touch with. I came back from Burning Man to find out my father was missing. Somehow I knew that he had passed when I heard that information, and readied myself for the news to come.

A few days later, I got a call from my sister, saying that our father had been found, and he had died.

My sister and I received all our dad’s artwork. A lifetime of it. He was very prolific because he was always creating. Including all the paper pieces, we probably received around 200 pieces of art. Maybe more.

We weren’t quite sure what to do with it, and it stayed with us for a few weeks before we decided that we would have a celebration of life, a last chance to ever buy a David Grojean original painting. The celebration of life was an amazing ceremony. We had many of his friends, even the ones that studied with him while he got his MFA at CU Boulder is the 70s to come up on stage to speak. My sister and I gave the final speech of the day.

It was not long after the celebration of life that I felt differently about my own artwork. I almost felt like a torch had been passed to me, that it was now my turn to start showing, selling, and marketing my art. So that’s what I did. In 2023 I printed my first ever piece of artwork and hung it on the walls of a brewery in Denver with the theme “Botanical”.

I now show my art in dispensaries, breweries, and cafes all around Denver. I show my art at art festivals all around Colorado, and every chance I get I show my work to anyone who is willing to take a look. I’m so proud of my artwork, and I’m certain that it’ll gain the recognition it deserves. Anytime anyone sees it, they mention how cool it is, and how original it is.

My only regret is not starting just a little sooner. I have so many questions about the art world I wish I could ask my father. So many things about hanging art, framing art, composition, color theory, and especially talking to galleries, I wish I could talk to him about. But I can’t. So just like he did, I will have to navigate the confusing land that is the art world, and I’ll have to make the same mistakes he did, and just like he did, act like a river, and flow around the barriers that find their way in my path to success.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Since showing my own artwork, there have been struggles. Traditional artists who don’t see digital art as a valid medium in the art world, the cost of entering art fairs, the pressure of having to have an online presence, especially on social media, which I would love not to have. But the biggest one, which I mentioned in my story would be not being able to ask my father for advice when it comes to navigating the art world. It seems nearly impossible to talk with galleries, and the advice online always seems to be changing or contradict its self.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I create abstract digital paintings. I wish I could put my work into a more specific genre, but I have no idea what the genre is called yet. I always ask people who visit my booth at art fairs what they would call it, and I always get a diffrent answer. I’ve gotten “Street art influenced abstract” to “Kandinski-ish” to “Looney Toons on acid”. I just call them Hooey Doodles. They aren’t really doodles, but they certainly are hooey!

When I’m drawing I enter a meditative space and just do what I know how to do. I have no idea what my pieces are going to look like when I start. I don’t know the composition, the color pallet, or even what shapes I’m going to use in the piece. I just start with the shape or shapes I’ve been drawing forever. By the time I’m finished, each new piece becomes my new favorite.

When people enter my art fair booth, they always take a moment before saying they’ve never seen anything like what I’m making before, which always brings a smile to my face. They always ask how the heck I make it. Some people think they are traditional paintings, others think I’m using an air brush, but most haven’t have a clue how I make my work. They just know it’s beautiful.

When people learn that I make it on an iPad, they always go in for a closer look, and seem to get excited. It’s a new medium that not a lot of artist are using right now. I am on the forefront of this technology when it comes to making fine art with it.

I’m experimenting with a few diffrent printing methods right now. I print on metallic paper for my prints in the print basket which looks really nice. I’ve done a few paintings on acrylic glass which looks amazing, and I would like to move more in that direction. The thing I’m most excited about though is a new printing method from a printer in Denver. Their printer prints layers and layers of white ink to create a texture. I can tell the printer what I want to be raised up, and what I want to be flat. What I want to be smooth, and what I want to have a rough texture. The printer then prints the color layer, and then it prints a varnish. Again, I can tell the printer what I want to be glossy, semi-gloss, and what to be matte. You really have to see the piece to fully understand. I’ve gotten a lot of excitement on this new method and I think it will really set me apart from anyone else who is making digital art.

Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I’m from Boulder originally, and the thing about people from Boulder, is that we don’t really leave Boulder, except to go to sports games, and the Elitch Gardens! So when I moved to Denver three years ago, it really did feel like moving to a new city, even if I grew up 25 minuets down the road! The Santa Fe Art District on first Fridays may be one of my favorite experiences. I just love all the people popping in and out of galleries, the food trucks, the vendors, it’s just such an amazingly fun time.

My least favorite thing about Denver is driving in it. I never realized how the streets make no sense at all, come in a crazy angles, and sometimes you have 6 lanes to choose from, and each one seems to go somewhere diffrent, so you have to plan accordingly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said to myself, “Welp, I guess I’m going this way” while watching the exit I should have taken goes by me!

Pricing:

• I print my work in a verity of ways on a verity of material so the price varies from $40 – $900

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hooeydoodles.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hooey_doodles
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HooeyDoodles
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@HooeyDoodles