Nathaniel Meyer

Artist Statement 

Since its inception. landscape painting exists as a site of projection; a nexus where cultural ideals, spiritual yearnings, and aesthetic ideologies converge. From the pastoral idealism of Claude Lorrain to the Romantic sublimity of Caspar David Friedrich, landscape has served not as a passive reflection of nature, but as a constructed image of human longing. These depictions were rarely about the land itself; rather, they articulated shifting relationships to nature, often filtered through memory, nostalgia, or ideology.

My work operates within this lineage, but from the vantage of a contemporary subjectivity shaped by ecological precarity, digital aesthetics, and personal history. I approach landscape not as topographical record but as mnemonic fiction; a space governed by the mechanics of recollection and desire. Although grounded in a vigorous plein air practice, my studio paintings are developed entirely from memory, prioritizing emotional impression over optical verisimilitude. The resulting images are distillations: landscapes filtered through the soft distortion of nostalgia and the fragmentation of memory.

Formally, my practice engages with the stylized precision of Golden Age illustration (N.C. Wyeth, Mayfield Parrish), the economy of form and flattened spatial hierarchies of early video game graphics, and the compositional drama and repoussoir of comic book splash pages. I also draw from the visual and emotional language of the landscape itself, particularly that of coastal Maine, where I spent my formative years. The rugged shorelines, dark forests, and mythic scale of that environment have become internalized in my visual imagination, less as literal places than as emotional architectures. My hard-edged approach emphasizes clarity and containment, allowing the paintings to exist in the space between realism and invention. They feel plausible, even recognizable, but are ultimately fabricated, psychological geographies rather than mappable terrains.

These works are steeped in both personal and cultural nostalgia. They reflect an imagined return to a childhood spent along the coast of Maine, already mythologized in my memory, and a broader cultural yearning for an intact natural world, increasingly inaccessible in the face of our ongoing climate crisis. The landscapes I construct are utopic but unreachable: Arcadian scenes of sublime stillness, radiant and complete, yet fundamentally unattainable. They gesture toward paradise, but remain elusive.

Ultimately, what compels me is the tension between yearning and impossibility—the desire to return to something that is forever closed off (and may never have existed in the first place). In that sense, my landscapes function less as destinations than as thresholds: visual spaces where presence and absence, hope and melancholy, coexist.