Of Men and Landscapes
library exhibit features rural scenery, ‘Guy Things’
features a joint show by artists Don Smith and John Meyer, whose work is shown
above and below, respectively.
The gallery in the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library is currently showing the work of two Wisconsin artists, John Meyer and Don Smith. “On Location” is a selection of Meyer’s many landscape paintings of the Mississippi River valley. Smith, a painter and printmaker, is presenting a collection of work called “Guys and Guy Things.” Both artists have long careers in making art, but their subjects and approach are quite different, lending the library’s space an interesting vibrancy of give-and-take.
Meyer’s painting focuses on the slowly changing architectural landscape within the even more slowly changing natural landscape of the region. “On Location” consists of 20 small paintings, no larger than 11”x14”, that are representative of decades of his work. Using his car as a mobile studio, Meyer drives around the Mississippi River towns and rural stretches near Pepin where he lives, looking for scenes that grab him. Meyer laughs, “I suppose I work in the car out of habit, working in construction you get more time off in winter and it’s sure better in the car than outside.” What grabs him tends to be a single farm or house in the larger landscape or a street scene in one of the small local towns. Sometimes, as in the watercolor “Tarantau at Duluth,” the resulting paintings are so detailed you could almost place the exact day and time they were made; sometimes, as in the oil “Waumandee Creek Garage,”they are so general that the building and landscape merge together into a timeless fact of interlocking form and color. Meyer aims to paint every day, sometimes painting the same subject repeatedly, and seems endlessly enthusiastic about it. “I know there’s something different there, the weather’s different, or I’m different,” he says. Through his time making a living as an engineer, Meyer still worked toward his standard of painting every day. “It’s a lot easier now that I’m retired,” he says. “Trying to do it every day was quite an effort when I was working 14 hour days. But to me it is my life.” And so the work reads as a calendar or journal of a human being immersing himself repeatedly in an act of richly and carefully seeing the place where he lives.
Smith’s “Guys and Guy Things” is a collection of paintings and prints about character and about the characters who display it. The 20 pieces range in size from a few inches across to a few feet across, including some portraits, some illustrations and a few landscapes. Always interested in drawing and painting, Smith’s desire to pursue the study of making art was first interrupted by Army service and then by a career as a farm veterinarian. Thirty years ago he retired and began to study and make art seriously. “The people I see influence what I do,” Smith says. “I imagine something about them. I guess I’m a storyteller.” The men and women in Smith’s work show the effects of life on their faces, and of finding their limits. They come from real local farms, faces in the crowd, the Bible, blues songs, and maddening Icelandic literature. Smith says he saw the mariachi depicted in “Un Mariachi Cansada” while out walking in Mexico and immediately stopped. “I thought, God, there’s a story there,” he recalls. In his statement, Smith writes that he has been inspired and bettered by having “made his living among rough good men” with “the ability to get a hard job done.” His print, “The Flight to Egypt,” shows the well-known Biblical episode of Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt to escape the massacre of children that was meant to eliminate the infant Jesus. Many painters through history have painted this scene showing the characters glowing with purpose (sometimes glowing in actuality) perhaps tired and gracefully drooping, but the tender little divine family moves onward to the certainty of safety. In Smith’s hands it is a desperate scene of refugees, torn up, almost dead with difficulty, with loss. Mary, the young mother riding on a donkey with the baby held in her arm, is so drawn with fatigue that she hardly looks human, while Joseph, the rough good man, even in his own exhaustion still pushes the faltering donkey forward toward an unfolding, as-yet-unwritten end. Here as a storyteller and an artist, Smith works at the ragged edges of living.
Past experience, career and temperament certainly shape the artwork made by these two artists, and will shape the audience for the work as well. Meyer’s paintings speak more of home and history interlocking into the daily landscape we both inhabit and create while Smith’s work is of edges and travel, of births, deaths, and difficult stories.
“On Location” and “Guys and Guy Things” are on display at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library in downtown Eau Claire through Feb. 14. For more information visit ecpubliclibrary.info or call 715-839-5004.
