Annie Meyer: Monotype Printmaker

Annie’s artwork focuses on the human figure and abstract landscapes. She has drawn the figure since high school, and works directly from a live model.

The landscapes come from places she travels to paint each year. With minimal colors and shapes they are more emotional rather than factual in content. She attributes her affinity for minimal landscapes to growing up in the Midwest, staring out at farmland with a few lines and few trees.  Her landscapes have evolved into an abstract sense of time and place. ” I aim to translate the sense of identity I feel with these landscapes that are both from my childhood and myself today.”

Monotypes:   Meyer’s monotypes  have evolved over the last 25 years studying the effects of light and sky with a limited palette of colors. Her current body of work continues to explore this subject matter, with nuanced perceptions.

She builds her monotypes up on her press with numerous thin layers of colors and ink, which she carefully rolls on to create a smooth surface, and thus achieves nuances of light and dark. The result is that the viewer may not so much see the complexity as perceive it.  For example, while the viewer might not explicitly see the base color of black it is nevertheless there, interacting with the subsequent layers of ink as well as the way in which light hits the paper, and then gets reflected back.  The light emanates from the paper with such strength that it appears to glow.

Despite the natural focus of her work, Meyer is not concerned with making artwork that is factual- but rather makes work that reflects the emotional feeling of a landscape, space, and skies. She grew up in the Midwest, where she spent a childhood staring at what seemed like a simplistic landscape, space and horizon, but “what I realized later actually has much more depth- it became part of my soul and identity.” It is these questions of feeling, perception, and being that drive her to use art to capture a particular energy as opposed to a particular scene.