Nathaniel Meyer is a landscape painter whose paintings strive to evoke the heroic and poetic aspects of the natural world. Meyer has exhibited widely. In 2024 Nathaniel was the Artist Spotlight at the Spring/Break Art Show in New York and Los Angeles. He was featured in the Northeast edition of New American Paintings in 2024 and was awarded the Blanche E. Colman Award in 2022. Nathaniel is based in Cumberland and Corea, Maine Artist StatementLandscape painting, at its heart, is the embodiment of an idealized, Romantic notion of nature that can only exist in our minds. In fact, it was not until people achieved sufficient removal from daily experience and confrontation with the harsh realities of the outside world that they began to idealize and conceptualize nature into a place of spiritual fulfillment. The painting of landscape is about making manifest that unattainable ideal. Nathaniel Meyer embraces this search for the ideal- in both subject and execution, the worlds he depicts are clearly fictions, possessed of their own inner logic; a storybook logic, with a storybook’s sense of grandeur. His paintings are an amalgam of recollected memory, nostalgia, direct observation, art historical research, and pure invention. Drawing inspiration from such disparate elements as Golden Age illustration, 8-bit video games, and comic splash pages, Meyer uses unambiguous, hard-edged specificity to create an idealized and consciously artificial representation of the complexity of the natural world. More supported by inner vision than external reference, Meyer’s rendering is believable, but not realistic. These paintings depict unattainable utopias, evoking a sense of hope and yearning.