Nathaniel Meyer

Artist Statement 

"Landscape painting, at its heart, is the embodiment of a Romantic notion of nature that can only exist in our minds. In fact, it was not until people achieved sufficient removal from daily experience and confrontation with the harsh realities of the outside world that they began to idealize and conceptualize it into a place of spiritual fulfillment. The painting of landscape, of “Nature”, is about making manifest that unattainable ideal.

I embrace this search for the ideal, and find it in some ways more genuine than paintings which purport to portray nature in an objective or purely perceptual manner. I strive for a heroic approach to landscape painting, making the depicted world more magical, more Homeric, and more monumental than our own.

These worlds depicted in my paintings are clearly chimeric fictions, but are possessed of their own inner logic- a storybook logic, with a storybook’s sense of grandeur. My landscapes are rendered with a hard-edged specificity that lends an aura of artificiality to the painting, but clearly delineates its respective elements. The rendering is unambiguous- believable, but not realistic in a perceptual sense.

A product of our current age of environmental uncertainty, as well as my own nostalgia for my childhood spent on the coast of Maine (another idealized fantasy), these paintings depict unattainable utopias. Evoking a sense of loss and yearning, these landscapes represent an attempted return to Arcadia, even if only through paint."