Small Abstract

Melissa Meyer is an American abstract painter and printmaker. Her energetic, colorful compositions express emotion and the transitory essence of reality.
She lives and works in New York City.

Education

Meyer studied art at New York University, receiving her BS in 1968 and her MA in 1975. She has received multiple grants and awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the NEA Grant in Painting. She is a frequent visiting artist at Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. She has taught at RISD and the Art Institute of Chicago, and since 1993 at The School of Visual Arts in New York.

Technique

Melissa Meyer has created a diverse oeuvre that includes oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, prints and large-scale public commissions. Her work is strongly influenced by color and line. Her brushstrokes and patterns possess a glyph-like quality, conveying a vibrant and deeply personal aesthetic language. Often when working she looks at her images in a mirror to get a backwards perspective on them. She also sometimes uses a reducing glass, a device that gives her the impression that she is farther away from the image than she is so she can read the image from afar. Meyer is skilled in a range of different printing techniques, including lithography, etching, monotype, silkscreen, and spit bite aquatint. To create her unique monotypes she paints on acetate sheets with watercolors, running the sheets through a press, often transferring multiple layers onto paper to complete the final image.

Inspiration

The work Meyer makes begins and ends with looking. Her inspiration could be spurred by seeing a color or a mark or a gesture, sometimes in a dream, sometimes in another one of her works. She jokes that she has been criticized because all of her favorite artists are dead. She is associated with the third generation of Abstract Expressionists. She works instinctively, and follows her personal intuition in the studio. In addition to her aesthetic influences Meyer is also inspired by dance (especially Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in The Bandwagon), architectural forms, letterforms and handwriting, classic jazz and classic blues, film noir, and a multitude of specific characters, songs and places, which often find their way into her titles and concepts.

Collections

Work by Meyer is included in the permanent collections of some of the most prestigious institutions in the world, including the New York MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Jewish Museum in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It is also in multiple corporate collections, including those of Estee Lauder, Johnson & Johnson, Hallmark Cards, IBM and Neiman Marcus.

Exhibitions

Melissa Meyer has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, as well as internationally. She has completed public commissions around the world, including in Kyrgyzstan, Shanghai, Tokyo, Miami and Queens.