Painting, Printmaking and "Multimedia" Installations

Bill Meyer, an established middle generation artist has lived and worked in Europe, Israel and U.S.A. whilst maintaining a studio base in rural Australia.

In a career of forty years Meyer has used photography, and devised sound works using a multitude of electronic and acoustic instruments as part of installation and performance pieces. He has painted murals, made paper, published poetry, and has conducted workshops for children and adults in forests, schools, public galleries and community centres. He has published more than 400 editions of etchings, screen prints and lithographs.Hamkom, his first book was published in 2006

As a master print-maker, Meyer established a fine art editioning studio in London during the seventies when he also worked with World Union of Jewish Students. He has worked with major Australian artists at Port Jackson Press publishing in Melbourne. During the eighties, whilst a committee member, and later as president of the Print Council of Australia, Meyer curated travelling exhibitions including the controversial Print as Object. He also created Gapspace, an exhibition of his prints and drawings which toured twenty four regional Australian galleries. In 1995 he participated in The wandering Jew, Myth & metaphor, curated and toured for the Jewish Museum of Australia, an organisation with which he has collaborated in numerous other curated and solo projects.

As a teacher he has instructed and lectured on contract and as a guest artist at schools, art colleges and universities in England, U.S.A. and Australia.

Meyer has received grants and sponsorship from the British Council, the Australia Council. He has also been funded by State Arts organisations for community projects in Wagga, N.S.W., and Camperdown, Victoria. Another grant brought Meyer to the Victorian Arts Centre for a multi media performance and installation piece. His work is in public, corporate, and private collections

Born in Australia in 1942, Meyer graduated from Melbourne University in art history and language and then from the National Gallery Art School, Victorian College of the Arts, completing his formal art training at the Royal College of Art in London. Research at the New York Y.I.V.O. Institute, as well as Yeshiva and Kollel learning has provided much of the conceptual underpinning of Meyer’s artwork. He has been a frequent visitor to Israel, where, during the ‘80s and ‘90s he was resident at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim artists’ studios in Jerusalem.

The theme of the wanderer recurs as metaphor and biography. Themes of forests as sanctuary and places for spiritual growth, family histories, and the sense of MAKOM, special place, interact with aspects of transience, exile and holocaust. Meyer the wanderer reinvents himself during each new journey. This metamorphosis is recorded on small etching plates, camera and notebook. The ostensible subjects, Australian landscape, rocky Judean hills, alley walls, barbed wire in Jerusalem, or in Berlin, are really psychological landscapes.

http://billmeyer-artist.com/

Glossary

  • Etching

    An intaglio process whereby a metal plate (normally copper, zinc or steel) is covered with an acid-resistant layer of rosin mixed with wax. With a sharp point, the artist draws through this ground to reveal the plate beneath. The plate is then placed in an acid bath (a water and acid solution) and the acid bites into the metal plate where the drawn lines have exposed it. The waxy ground is cleaned off and the plate is covered in ink and then wiped clean, so that ink is retained only in the etched lines. The plate can then be printed through an etching press. The strength of the etched lines depends on the length of time the plate is left in the acid bath.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.