MiXX Atelier February: “Field of Vision,” featuring the art of Meredith Nemirov!

30 Jan MiXX Atelier February: “Field of Vision,” featuring the art of Meredith Nemirov!

For the month of February, MiXX Atelier is featuring “Field of Vision,” a mini-retrospective of the art of Meredith Nemirov from 2006 – 2023. The official opening coincides with Art Walk.

Telluride Arts’ Art Walk takes place Thursday, February 2. Participating venues are open from 5-8pm, hosting receptions to introduce new exhibits and artists. 

Complimentary gallery guides, offering a self-guided tour, are available at participating venues or online at telluridearts.org/tellurideartwalk. Use it any time to help navigate through the venues which are open to the public most days. 

For more information about the Telluride art galleries and exhibition venues, visit: www.telluridearts.org/galleries. View more Telluride Arts District upcoming events here: www.telluridearts.org/calendar

Go here for more about Telluride Arts.

Artist Meredith Nemirov. Credit: JT Thomas.

A field of view is the extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment. A visual field can be defined as the entire area that can be seen when an eye is fixed straight at a point.

Meredith Nemirov has spent the past 30 years looking out her window at aspen trees and walking the forests of Southwest Colorado.

The February show at MiXX is “Field of Vision,” a fitting title since the mini-retrospective includes many of Meredith’s on-site observational drawings and paintings dating back to 2006. Stand-alone works of art and the various series she has created are all riffs on the natural world, aspen trees in particular.

“While mainly an observational painter, Meredith’s experience of spending time drawing and painting among aspen trees led her to intense visual explorations of naturally occurring phenomena…Most recently, her series ‘River Feeds the Trees’ uses old topographical maps of Colorado, where she paints the color blue into all the canyons, arroyos, and dry washes to create an abundance of rivers and streams,” explains Orion Magazine.

“River Feeds the Trees” (2021- 2022) is one of the groups of paintings featured in Meredith’s MiXX show.

“This past summer of extreme wildfires side by side with the Covid pandemic created a figurative conflagration in the studio which resulted in these works on paper. It is a process where I am painting a ‘rewatering’ of the landscape. Working on historic maps showing the topography of Colorado, the image makes a connection between the trees and a multitude of rivers appearing in the surrounding canyons. The linear elements and patterns assigned by map-makers to the various aspects of the geology of the land are visual elements in the landscape and the form of the tree. The idea of connectivity in nature has been a recurrent theme in my work and is expressed in this particular series…,” explains the artist.

Truth be told, Meredith has always painted her mind and is known for saying a mouthful in a few strokes – or, now and again, in words.

“To stand and face a whole landscape, to paint ‘en plein air’ and make a painting capturing the scene on a two-dimensional surface in a relatively short period of time is rigorous, but that’s what we artists are driven to do day after day: we interpret our world to find our place in it.”

Though at times finding her place in the world proved challenging. One of those pivotal moments in the Meredith’s career followed the death of her father in September 2006:

“During the winter that followed I found spending days alone in the studio very difficult. What I could do was stand outside in the landscape and paint. My paints froze, I froze, but looking and painting was what I could do. I wanted to find a way back into my studio and my aspen tree-based work, so this series of drawings was started, back inside, looking out at a subject that had been the focus of my work for the last few years…”

Winter leads to spring, when Meredith began to explore the nuances of her persistent muse – the aspen trees outside her Ridgway studio – making abstracted “map” markings, focusing on patterns of lights hitting the trees, at times eschewing color and working exclusively in black-and-white with a focus on values (or how light or dark a given color or hue can be, best understood when visualized as a scale or gradient from dark to light.)

“Winter into Spring,” (2006-7) is also featured in “Field of Vision,” a show that pays tribute to one of Meredith’s major artistic influences, legendary artist Paul Klee, who said:

“In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me… I was there, listening…I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it…I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint to break out.”

Since 2006, Meredith has been painting aspen trees obsessively, prayerfully, finding solace in their graceful, humorous, awkward, changeable forms.

Aspen in Fall 3022, 30×40.

Aspen in Fall 2022, 30×40.

Aspen in Summer, 2016, 30×40

She continues to paint aspens obsessively, only what was once anthropomorphized has been reduced – happily, brilliantly, we might add – to shape and color without reference to figure and ground. Now these images reinforce, rather than fight, the two-dimensional medium in which Meredith works.

In The Garden One

In The Garden Two

“When you paint something over and over again, repetitive forms begin to catch your eye as do certain colors. I think my abstractions dance, reflecting my ongoing interest in rhythm and pattern. Though my colors still reflect the natural world.”

The third series in the show is “Solstice,” (2010), lyrical 11 x 11-inch oils Meredith created by looking outside her window at the vegetation in her backyard at the time of the longest and the shortest days of the year.

The Last Daisy

Elm out my window

Yellow Columbines

Along Cottonwood Creek, 2018

Young Apple in Sunshine. 12/2015.

Along Cottonwood Creek 1/2018

Also in “Field of Vision,” are random examples of recents works such as:

January Wolf Moon, acrylic on cradled wood panel, 20 x 20 x 1.5.

“The Blue Hour,” acrylic on cradled wood panel, 20 x 20

The Aspen Meadow, acrylic on cradled wood panel, 30 x 40.

Bottom line: The sensual paintings and drawings in “Field of Vision” create an inventory of some of the magic in the landscapes of Southwest Colorado. Collectively Meredith’s sorcery proves how utterly enchanting, how utterly amazing the things we look at everyday – but all too often don’t really see – can be.

Meredith Nemirov, more:

Artist Meredith Nemirov. Credit: JT Thomas.

Meredith Nemirov was born and raised in New York City. She started drawing the figure from live models at the Art Students League in Manhattan at age 14.

After receiving a BFA from Parson’s School of Design, Meredith continued working as a figurative painter, doing freelance illustration on the side to pay the bills. After art critic Lawrence Alloway juried her work in her first major show at The Queens Museum, Meredith quit illustration to devote herself full time to painting. Exhibitions at major museums and galleries followed, shows at the Brooklyn Museum; Yeshiva University Museum; The American Museum of Immigration; and other prestigious venues.

Meredith first arrived in the Telluride region in 1988, settling down in Ridgway with her husband Jorge, also an artist, and son Raoul, ditto. (Raoul is now working for the The New Times.) The gallery they opened at their new address specialized in antique prints, maps and books about the exploration of the American West. It closed in 1999.

Today, Meredith maintains a studio in Ridgway, also working part-time in Spain, where she and Jorge teach every year on the island of Mallorca.

Find Meredith Nemirov at her website, www.meredithnemirov.com, on FaceBook (Meredith Nemirov), or on Instagram (@meredith.nemirov).