Artist’s Statement

Matthew Meyer

      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 often work in series. This allows me to become more and more intimately familiar with my subject with each successive piece. I just completed my 43^rd rubber duck, and have begun a series of hot dogs. There is a certain juvenile, crass American-ness about these objects I find endearing. There is a certain irony, too, in elevating such banal subject matter to the level of high art through the medium of paint that I find intriguing, as well.

         While I have begun experimenting with the use of photos, I do still find the process of painting from life to be a magical one and worthy of note- sheerly because of the wonderful weirdness of it all. I mean, here we are in the 21^st century, surrounded by wifi and other digital distractions, yet people still find reasons to sequester themselves away from the outside world to huddle next to a few discrete objects they’ve extracted from said world, spending vast amounts of solitary, personal time towards the ends of observing and then recording these objects in paint. While I can appreciate all the reasons and rationalizations for utilizing modern conveniences in fashioning an image, there is still a part of me that gets a thrill out of drawing or painting something ‘from thin air’. The extra time that this older process necessitates informs our relationship to the objects we are depicting and gets built into the final image itself.

     My latest work seeks to impart some of my fascination with this process to the viewer. The newest installment in my long-running series of ducks pulls back from the still-life to reveal the box I’ve constructed in order to keep the lighting situation constant and controlled- it isn’t just a still life, it is a still life pictured. It has also come to bear on the collaborative works I do with my brother Nathaniel. While previously our works have always had a narrative bent, we have embarked on a series in which we paint ourselves, sometimes in the act of painting, further bringing an awareness of the process to bear on the viewer’s experience of the work.

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