Nathaniel Meyer: Under a Swift Sunrise

Under a Swift Sunrise gathers a series of island paintings that hover between memory and invention, myth and recollection. The title borrows from Tolkien’s vision of the Undying Lands, a place glimpsed beyond the mortal world: “the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores, and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” It is not simply a description of a distant land, but an evocation of longing itself, where the imagination fashions a paradise from fragments of memory.

These paintings arise from that same longing. Though grounded in lived experience and plein-air observation, they are not depictions of real islands, but psychological terrains; fragments of remembered coastlines reassembled through the soft distortion of nostalgia and desire. Yet these islands are not easily entered. Undergrowth, rocks, and steep inclines interrupt the viewer’s path, withholding access. Where traditional landscape painting often invited entry through a meandering path or opening, these compositions resist approach. This deliberate inaccessibility echoes the condition of longing itself- a vision of paradise glimpsed, but never reached.

These islands become metaphors for distance and return, isolation and hope. Bathed in hard light and stillness, they suggest worlds untouched, yet entirely constructed. In this sense, Under a Swift Sunrise is less about arrival than about the yearning to arrive; to glimpse, if only momentarily, a far green country that exists somewhere between what is remembered and what is imagined.