Another duck-in-progress that I've gone back into...

                                           The next session on good ol' number what's-his-name...
                                           I've since put in additional sessions (I'll post photos of them soon) but this is
                                           how he looked when I brought him to my mentor, George Nick, a few days
                                           ago. A finished duck and comments on my first visit will follow shortly.

                       
                                                             Back out in the field

                                     Getting there... needs a little more specificity here and there

In response to some comments offered at recent crits I've decided to experiment with including more human-made aspects of the landscape... 

                                                 here I am, just a slob in his natural habitat...

And the underpainting its ownself. Ready to get back out-

                                                   After another two sessions. Gettin' there...

Some new rubber duck underpaintings. I love working with this guy. I think they'll be numbers 40 and 41 in the series... I'll have to check my painting log soon to nail down exactly where I am. Fairly sure he's been posing for me since at least the summer of '99.

                                                                 Back out in the field

                                                                Finished underpainting

So here I am on the beginning of my MFA journey, standing in front of my work on the crit wall:

And here's my most recent artist's statement:

Artist’s Statement

Matthew Meyer

            It intrigues me that, for all its maddening variety, it is in the human nature to accept the world in its totality, and, sometimes, to experience a sense of oneness with it.  Each of my paintings represents an effort to encode the shifting complexities of the world and our place within it. Through the layering of brushstrokes and the decisions they represent, I work to create an organic whole suggestive of much more than the sum of its parts. My faith in painting rests on the conviction that any subject, no matter how simple or commonplace, may come to stand for not just a piece of existence, but the whole wide world.  

            I find inspiration in the works of artists like Frantisek Kupka and John Singer Sargent, whose freshness of application gets at the vitality of life while also representing its totality, whose work represents a response to Nature as a whole rather than an amalgam of its particulars. Although their works were often the products of many long hours of toil, reflection, and revision they still read like one singular burst of creation. Without being overtly political or resorting to histrionics or sentimentality their work speaks to the human experience in a way that I find continually fresh and, above all, sincere.

Art maintains its relevance in the face of crushing modernity because it is an interface through which the past can inform and interact with the present. You share an experience in viewing a great work of art, even by yourself, because implicit in the encounter is the fact that the artist looked upon the same scene when they took a step back and judged their work complete. That moment when all of a work’s elements crystalize is a magical one. As viewers we reconstruct that moment in time; you are looking at a painting with the painter, at sculpture with the sculptor. For this reason, I generally prefer artists whose work reveals its process, for it allows the viewer to more vividly recreate its inception.  

I have also been work on a series of large-scale collaborative works with my brother, Nathaniel Meyer. Narrative in nature, they tell their tales through a shared set of symbols gleaned through years of exposure to the same graphic media and social world. Other than the one-and-a-half years that separate our births, we, as brothers, have spent very little time away from one another. As siblings we have experienced and been exposed to much in these last thirty-seven-odd years. Our father being a painter, we also both received our early artistic training from the same man. In short, we have much more in common than our genetic makeup. It is this common core of experience and understanding of one another that allows us to create the collaborative work  shown in my portfolio.

            As we have shouldered the yoke of responsibility and respectability that comes with adulthood for more than a few years now, it is only natural that this collaborative work would deal with themes of Choice and Escape. As for what the future holds for our collaborations I can only hope that they will continue to be a successful mixture of nature and nurture.

-Matthew Meyer, 2012

I look forward to seeing how both my work and the aims behind it evolve as I move through the Art Institute of Boston's Master of Fine Arts program.