a silence fell with the waking bird

Meg Brown Payson

January 21 - March 20, 2021

About The Show

An exhibition of the work of Meg Brown Payson, who taught for many years at the Maine College of Art and whose work has been exhibited throughout the Northeast United States, including the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Portland Museum of Art, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, The Painting Center, and the Hillwood Art Museum.

Wild landscape is alive and breathing. It is complex, variable, huge, immersive and minutely exquisite.

My paintings celebrate landscape. They evolve over time in layers of chance and deliberation generated by the material nature of water and pigment interacting with the sorting nature of my mind. They are abstract, spacious and detailed. They are open also transformed as prints, with multiplying repetitions generating the appearance of odd figures and deep spaces, and radical changes of size creating magical shifts in scale.

I am interested in how concepts of emergence and evolution apply equally to human thinking and natural orders; and in how habits of perception and descriptive language can limit thoughtful understanding—specifically of the non-human world.

The paintings are acrylic. The prints are multi-plate monoprints, lithographs and digital reproductions on paper, aluminum and textile. Many works are very small, some are big enough to fill a wall: together, they offer a vision of landscape as a not-quite-familiar shared space that changes with movement and time, and challenge the viewer to look more closely at both the implied objectivity of traditional landscape painting and, more importantly, at the rich mysteries of the wild world around them. - Meg Brown Payson

Featured Artist

Featured

Meg Brown Payson

“For me, the northern New England landscape is charged with both deep family history and memories of shared adventures. From the beginning, I have wanted my art to reflect my sense of this place as integral to my sense of self.”