Eternal Return

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. Nathaniel Meyer embraces this search for the ideal- the worlds he depicts are fictions, but are also possessed of their own inner logic; a storybook logic, with a storybook’s sense of grandeur. Nathaniel Meyer paints lush, verdant worlds depicting the heroic and poetic aspects of the coast of Maine. They are an amalgam of recollected memory, nostalgia, direct observation, art historical research, and pure invention.

Drawing inspiration from such disparate elements as Golden Age illustration, 8-bit video games, and comic splash pages, Meyer uses unambiguous, hard-edged specificity to create an idealized and consciously artificial representation of the complexity of the natural world. A product of our current age of environmental uncertainty, as well as his own nostalgia for his childhood spent on the coast of Maine (another idealized fantasy), these paintings depict unattainable utopias. Evoking a sense of hope and yearning, these landscapes represent an attempted return to Arcadia, even if only through paint. Find more on our website.