Meredith Nemirov
Artist Statement:
All of my work is done from nature and my immediate environment, the aspen forests, the Rocky Mountains, observational, perceptual, drawn or painted on site, en plein air, then more recently, paint follows memory, sensation, and movement in my surroundings. A sound, a stirring in the air.
That is to say that the act of being outside painting, in the moment, is so much more than making a painting of the scene observed. It is a record, an act of being a witness of all that is before you, capturing what occurs during that passage of time. The weather and light changing, the wind, and also the agitation from the mosquitoes buzzing about, the urgency to make a painting of the total experience.
A shifted point of view -and what you can find by moving about in the landscape. Stepping back from the easel, turning around and being surprised by something, a shape, a color, something you could not see until you had reached that point in your own painting, the body of the paint itself, following a direction or a form observed and discovered in the landscape.
My chosen medium, watercolor, encourages this active and direct form of painting. Before my brush touches the paper there is an intense time of looking, planning and deciding what it is I want to capture in the painting. Then the marks are purposeful, the washes permanent and the movement forward towards the finished work.
My work is influenced by the paintings of the early modernist painters Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin and Milton Avery. Also by artists that came before them, in particular the drawings of Vincent Van Gogh, Japanese woodblock artists Hokusai and Hiroshige and the paintings of Cezanne and Matisse. I am inspired by the work of contemporary landscape painters like Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, and Gregory Amenoff among others.
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