karan ruhlen gallery PR 5.30.06

Karan Ruhlen Gallery
Santa Fe
Kurt Meer
New Works
Friday, July 14, 5 to 7pm

“The artist looks at [Nature’s] flower, not with the enlarging lens, that he may gather facts for the botanist, but, with the light of the one, who sees, in his choice selection of brilliant tones and delicate tints, suggestions of future harmonies.” –James McNeil Whistler, Ten O’Clock Lecture, 1885





As an art student at the University of Memphis, Kurt Meer says he was profoundly affected by the theories of Whistler. “I have adopted Whistler’s comparison of painting to music,” he says. “Color is like a keyboard where there is a root key or color harmony within which there are a variety of chords created by playing opposites against one another, such as warm and cool, saturated and unsaturated. All of these build to a tension that is resolved by returning to the root harmony.”

Whistler found one means of expressing his theories in a series of works depicting the River Thames at night. For Meer, the Mississippi River that flows through his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, is the inspiration. “For several years I worked in downtown Memphis and watched the changing face of the river throughout the seasons, in times of drought and flooding, and under varied lighting conditions, including sunrise and sunset. I came to know its subtleties, and while the rivers in my paintings are imaginary abstractions of water, sky and vegetation shapes, they undoubtedly go back to my memory of the Mississippi and its fast-moving energy.”

Unlike the vigor of the Mississippi, Meer says his goal is to convey tranquility and to create images that become “points of meditation … like seeing water in the early morning when it is still and glasslike.” In many ways his archetypal bodies of water are both timeless as well as indicators of time, affirming what Heraclitus stated, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in.”

For his first solo show at Karan Ruhlen Gallery, Meers says that the series of works is based on a theme of origins or genesis. “The theme has taken on a life of its own,” he enthuses. The harmony he achieves through color echoes in Meer’s compositions. “I use ancient principles of architecture and geometry, both Western and Eastern, in sizing my panels and composing within that space,” he says. Meer has also started to finish the paintings with a veneer of wax. “Wax is archival and both permanent and removable. It results in just the type of surface sheen and depth that unifies the colors,” he says.

Meer has just a passing memory of having studied the theories of Carl Jung, but one can readily imagine in the landscapes Jung’s notion that water symbolizes the unconscious and a revelation of the shadow side. As the philosopher noted in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, “The dreamer, thirsting for the shining heights, has first to descend into the dark depths,” where there is “no inside and no outside, no above or below, no here or there…. It is the world of water where all life floats in suspension: where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living begins; where I am indivisibly this and that: where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.” Susan McGarry

new paintings 5.10.06

Paintings from the Linda Ross show in Memphis.

Linda Ross Gallery

article 5.25.06

from Memphis Flyer Magazine

Out of the Shadows
Kurt Meer: alchemist of form and light.

BY CAROL KNOWLES | MAY 24, 2006


With "Origin," Kurt Meer fills the L Ross Gallery with sparsely composed, eerily calm, and hauntingly beautiful landscapes. Like many American landscape painters of the second half of the 19th century, especially the Luminists, Meer accentuates light. Glints of bright color shine through shadowy worlds and spread across skies that dominate his picture planes. Imperceptible brush strokes infuse dawn (Begin III) and dusk (Gloaming II) with the palest possible melons, teals, and violets. These softly glowing colors enrich the dark bends of rivers, highlight the tops of tree lines, and reflect in still waters.

What makes "Origin" a particularly compelling body of work is Meer's pairing of these landscapes with a series of small figurative works. Each of these portraits consists of a lone figure: a woman whose body blurs into the background. Sometimes, as in Lapse, this sphinx-like figure closes her eyes, faces straight ahead, and, along with the stone facades surrounding her, appears to crumble into eons of time.

Another figure stirs things up in Voyage III. She turns away from ancient vistas, away from the viewer. She cocks her head to the side and appears lost in thought and feeling. The exhibition's loosest brushwork and most luminous colors explode around and inside her. Meer's portraits of mind in matter suggest that awareness is pervasive and that consciousness, fully engaged in the present moment, wields a power that can move mountains and open up the sky.

Meer's carefully observed landscapes also transform matter. In Late II, grass on a riverbank softens as mist rises through its blades. The mist shimmers as light passes through its vapors. The mist bends the light, and the light colors the mist a green-gray. The mist rises further and brightens as it passes through pale violet atmosphere. All of Meer's paintings capture hundreds of these variations in texture, color, and brightness.

This artist's accomplished techniques combine with his elegant understanding of light and form to convincingly depict the gray-violets of twilight (Late II), muted yellow light filtering though fog along a riverbank (Awake V), and the complex colors of a sunrise where yellows, peaches, and greens radiate out and overlap (Awake IV). The half-light of dawn mutes the greens of trees and scumbles their edges (Begin III). Dusk turns the trees of Voyage into phantom shadows and the riverbanks of Awake IV into pale gray abstractions. In all of Meer's works, land morphs into water into mist into atmosphere suggesting the permeable, interdependent qualities of the natural world.

No sharp shadows create the illusion of dimensionality. No clear lines of perspective thrust our point of view to a distant horizon. The effect on viewer perceptions is subtler and more complete. In Edge, one of Meer's smallest, most seamless landscapes, a golden-orange ray of light spreads across the sky, becomes fainter and fainter, and, at the apex of the painting, becomes a barely perceptible glow. Edge takes us to the edge of transcendence; and, perhaps more importantly, this profoundly relaxing work -- as well as all of Meer's paintings -- still the mind, calm the body, and gently immerse us in the subtleties of the given world.

article 5.19.06

Meditating on the landscape

from Memphis Commercial Appeal

May 19, 2006


The Romans appreciated the pastoral genre in poetry and in the mural decoration of their villas, but the Middle Ages regarded landscape art with suspicion, the physical world being viewed as fallen and sinful. Artists in the Renaissance often included fantastic or idealized landscapes as background for their religious paintings or portraits, like the misty topography against which Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" poses.



Landscape painting as a genre was born in 16th century Netherlands and northeastern Italy as the traditions of purely devotional art faded before the secular interests of a rising mercantile class. Soon, the genre became a conduit for cultural feelings about the relationship between humans and nature, and such artists as the French Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (circa 1605-1682) and Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael (circa 1628-1682) were producing landscape paintings fraught with atmosphere and implication.

At the end of the 18th century, Romantic beliefs that nature was imbued with spiritual qualities and that human consciousness and the sentience of nature were only a blink apart impelled such efforts as Constable's agreeably pastoral depictions of the English countryside and German artist Caspar David Friedrich's intensely poetic landscape paintings.

The American Hudson River School (circa 1825-1875), influenced by a notion of the sublime, with its implications of scope and grandeur, reached apotheosis with Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt's enormous canvases depicting Western mountain landscapes in anthem-like tribute to manifest destiny.

French Impressionists like Monet and Pissarro worked the opposite strain in landscape, reducing the sublime to intimate studies of the effects of light through shifting moments of time.

Landscape painting fell on hard times in the 20th century as a genre deemed inappropriate for the fragmentation and psychological subjectivity of modernism.

So, where does the long heritage of landscape painting leave the artists who are showing work in Memphis now?

"Landscape is really a manifestation of a world view," said Meer, whose dimly glowing paintings, with titles like "Begin," "Late" and "Awake" take landscape toward the extreme borders of realism.

"My work is headed toward complete abstraction, toward oblivion. You can't just jump into nonrepresentation. You have to come up with a system of solutions for representing things, the way light hits an object or a piece of land, and reduce it to essentials. You have to arrive there from a long process. It points back to Eastern ideas of enlightenment through repetition, reduction through doing something and practicing something. If you watch any great athlete or musician, the process seems simple, but duplicating it is impossible."

Meer, 37, started in architecture but has a degree in graphic design from the University of Memphis.

An issue in landscape painting is working en plein air, as the French call it, that is, painting, or at least sketching, outside directly from nature. That process was essential for the Impressionists, but Meer does not regard it as important.

"Really, I never paint outside," said Meer. "My process is 21st century. I use the computer and the Internet as a tool. I download thousands of photographs. It's an abstract process of appropriation and synthesis."

Despite his reliance on new technology, Meer insists on the metaphysical nature of his landscape paintings.

"I'm striving for the inner life of nature," he said, "trying to comprehend more than we ordinarily comprehend. These paintings should be objects of contemplation like an icon, but a point of meditation, more for spirituality than prayer. The paradox of meditation is that you go deeper inside yourself in order to lose yourself. That's what I'm after."

-- Fredric Koeppel: 529-2376