Alexandra Grant Opens Up About Life with Keanu Reeves: ‘I’ve Lived with John Wick and Neo’

Artist Alexandra Grant launched her new wine brand LOVEwine, inspired by her art initiative grantLOVE and her childhood experiences in Paris

Alexandra Grant is sharing rare insight into her and Keanu Reeves’ artistic processes and life together.

Grant, 53, is a visual artist who has been romantically linked to Reeves, 61, since 2019. The pair first connected professionally with the book Ode to Happiness, which Reeves wrote and Grant illustrated; they co-founded a publishing house and went public with their relationship two years later.

Speaking at a launch event for her new wine brand LOVEwine in Los Angeles on Thursday, May 28, Grant described how they navigate work and studio time.

“He’s always so appreciative, so he’s always cautious, I think, with feedback, and I would say the same,” Grant tells PEOPLE of their relationship — and whether she allows Reeves to visit her in the art studio while she’s working.

“You want to always be respectful and leave the other person to bake their cake. Just talking about my love makes me sweat,” she says of each of their respective artistic processes. “I would say that there is all the listening in the world that we know that we could talk about any problem or challenge or creative idea and talk about it forever if that is needed, and also respect the individual need to dive deep and have a process that’s maybe quiet or in another collaboration.”

“So I’d say the key to it is the mutual respect and also just like, come on, it’s play, right? It’s play that we get to play creatively. The last thing I will say that I think we share is just the belief in projects,” she adds. “Every project has its own autonomy, its own team, it has its own sort of rules, and it has a beginning, middle and end. So we both are people who do projects, and you know, I’ve lived with John Wick, I’ve lived with Neo.”

Reeves is best known for playing the title role in the John Wick franchise and for starring as Neo in The Matrix films.

“When he’s in a character, for example, I have so much respect for that understanding that this is the middle to the end of a project, right? And I think the same goes for painting,” Grant says. “When I’m in painter mode, I am in it. I’m fully in it, and it’s not playing a character, but it is performing, you know, painting really is a form of performance too.”

Grant’s work has been exhibited in galleries nationwide — from Los Angeles to New York City — and in museums in East Lansing, Michigan, and Baltimore, Maryland, as well as at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), according to her official website. Her new wine brand is a collaboration between her art and design initiative grantLOVE — she frequently uses the LOVE symbol in her work, per the project’s site — and California’s J Vineyards and Winery.

Grant tells PEOPLE her interest in wine began during a summer she spent in Paris between seventh and eighth grade with her mother, an American diplomat stationed in France at the time.

“We spent the summer living in a tiny, tiny French hotel room — two inches around each mattress, trying to shove the suitcases [away] and looking for an apartment. And I am the only child of a single mom. So it was like, just the two of us on this great adventure. There wasn’t really a plan for my summer.”

She recalls that at one restaurant a server suggested she try the wine with the prix fixe menu.

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“My mom said, you know, she’s only 12. Can you give her a Coca-Cola or water?” Grant says. “The waitress stormed off and came back and put a giant glass of wine in front of me and said, ‘Madame, la Coca Cola, ‘c’est mauvais pour votre enfant.’ [“It is bad for your child,” translated to English.]”

“And that was the introduction to the culture of wine,” she says.

Via: People