Along one of Walla Walla’s stately tree-lined streets lies a house whose cellar holds a secret. When one begins to speak of secrets and cellars, the images conjured are often dark doings and things that need to be hidden, but the cellar studio of Neil Meitzler lies in stark contrast to such conventions.
In keeping with the often-geologic nature of many of Meitzler’s works, one could think of Meitzler’s studio, instead, as some cavern of creativity where canvases line the walls like the colorful bands of a river stone; flat files hold the sediment of years of creative exploration.
I would encourage you to look up Meitzler’s biography online. After reading it, one is hard-pressed not to see in his water and rock paintings the northwest landscapes he occupied as a youth, to recognize the lingering iconography of his religious upbringing, to recall the family green house where he worked growing up. It will be impossible not to hear the ghosts that whisper through his paintbrush or evade sense of the solitary that haunts even his most active compositions.
Though any of Meitzler’s images might originate with the real: rock, river, house, table, flower, translated through the filter of memory and depicted with often experimental painting and printmaking techniques, his images move into a much more psychological existence. There is something in Meitzler’s work that encourages the viewer to move into these spaces and make them his/her own.
Artist Neil Meitzler has lived in Walla Walla, Washington since the late1980’s. Meitzler ranks among the historical Northwest School of artists, which also includes Kenneth Callahan, Mark Tobey, and Morris Graves. His work has been in numerous exhibitions throughout the Northwest and occupies a number of prominent collections including the Seattle Art Museum, The Museum of Northwest Art, and The Jundt Museum.
Since Metzler is known primarily for his dramatic landscapes, Gertrude is very fortunate to offer its viewers a glimpse into some of the other subjects explored by artist Neil Meitzler.
Whatever window this artist opens to the viewer with his paintings, Meitzler gracefully blurs the line between realism and abstraction. The rich textures of his works create dreamlike vistas. The most spare of Meitzler’s images is crowded with possible narratives.
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