Art as Object and Space, Familiar and Unfamiliar: A Conversation with Pathbreaking Artist linn meyers

linn meyers, studio portrait by Chantal Anderson, 2024. Courtesy of Jason Haam gallery.

Visual artist linn meyers (b. 1968) is a highly original phenom in the contemporary art world. She works in multiple modalities – painting, drawing, prints, and site-specific wall drawings. You can view many examples of her transporting work here. She has exhibited her work all over the world and has received many significant awards. She routinely receives large commissions and holds residencies at leading institutions. linn splits her time between her studios in Washington, DC, and LA. She currently has a piece exhibited at The Kreeger Museum in DC called Mirror World (2022), as part of the collection, “Here, in this little bay: Celebrating 30 Years at the Kreeger” (June 1, 2024 – October 5, 2024). She also has a painting on view at Baltimore Museum of Art.

In the conversation below, linn and I explore many aspects of her creative process, including her turn to embracing intuitive dimensions of her work and her broader senses of her work as reflecting upon time as change, and upon ambiguity and ephemerality. Her art is both an object and a space, and this space is both familiar and unfamiliar. Her art is inextricably tied to the process of its creation. For this reason, linn resists the words abstract or representational for her work. Her art is the thing, not a removed portrayal referring to something else in the so-called real world. Her work also reflects upon our brief, transient existences as humans. linn shares how her work could be called an index of time, with time defined as change. She describes ways in which she surrenders to the principles, or the sovereignty, of a piece.

The call of art always has guided linn’s life as something that seemed obvious to her as a central pulse or throughline. She recalls her travels through the early years and her unexpected arrival at a space where she could dedicate herself full-time to her art.

Lauren Coyle Rosen: How does your art come to you? I remember that you said you wouldn’t necessarily describe it as a spiritual experience, per se, but that it is in the sense of being connected to broader phenomena. Would you call it intuitive?

linn meyers: Yeah, I would. It’s funny that to use that word, intuitive. I had a real aversion to the idea of the intuitive in my work for a while. And I remember exactly when it ended. I had been making work in the early aughts that I would have described as systems-based. My idea in moving the work in that direction had been that I could make things that were undeniable. That if something was driven by a system, one couldn’t as easily question the outcomes.

Then, in 2010, I was working on an installation at The Phillips Collection [in DC], which was part of an exhibition series called “Intersections,” in which artists were invited to make work in response to the permanent collection.

The Curator of Contemporary Art, Vesela Sretenovic, had asked me to identify a work from the museum’s collection to respond to. I chose a van Gogh painting called The Road Menders [1889]. I asked the museum to move that painting to the wall that visitors would see as they were approaching the small, second-floor gallery that I was working in. As one approached the entrance to the small gallery, one could see my installation piece, so visitors were able to have a relationship with both my work and the van Gogh at the same time.

At the time being, by linn meyers, and The Road Menders, by Vincent van Gogh.

Phillips Collection, 2010

At the time being, by linn meyers.

Phillips Collection, 2010

I had prepared scaled preparatory drawings to guide me as I was working on-site, but I started to tweak things a little bit along the way. As I worked, I thought about the van Gogh painting, and his method of image-making, and I noticed that my approach to the process was shifting.

I found a new comfort with the idea of working intuitively because of that experience. After I completed that project, the work I made in the studio became a lot less rigidly systems-based. I started to kind of come to terms with the fact that the systems that I had been using to remove myself from the decisionmaking process – the decisions that identified the systems – were mine. I had been making systems-based works in an effort to remove myself, yet I was still completely woven into the way that things developed.

I didn’t look back after that. I broke free from whatever that restraint was. I still work with a system of mark-making that I’ve established over the years, but I’m always willing to let that system slip or make changes to the rules as a piece is developing. When I’m working on a painting, I am also responding to it. The process is much more like a conversation. Before I began taking this new approach, it was more mathy, even though I’m not mathy. It was more like the rules were set up beforehand.

Lauren: Did you feel like you were moving according to certain functions or, say, deterministic rules?

linn: Yes, exactly.

Lauren: Would those functions or rules have to do with things like angles and colors?

linn: It was more about the specific marks that I was making. The colors were still pretty intuitive. I want to say that the rules and the colors were all set up beforehand. As I began a painting, I had already determined the palette.

Lauren: When you say that you have a conversation with the piece, how do you talk to it? Or how does it respond to you?

linn: That’s such a good question. Let me show you this piece I’ve been working on for about a year, on and off.

Luxury of a Rainbow, by linn meyers, 2024, in the artist's studio. Photographed by linn meyers.

Portion of Luxury of a Rainbow, by linn meyers, 2024, in the artist's studio. Photographed by linn meyers.

It had been rolled up for awhile, while I finished other works. I had sort of given up on it. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to trash it, but I pulled it back out again, and I put it on the floor, and I spilled a bunch of paint on it just to see what would happen. It got much, much, much darker. You could see all the different layers of marks in there. Those are multiple paintings that existed. After I poured paint over what I had already made, I added the pole shape in the middle, in a color I call a safety orange. I actually sanded that section off of the painting, and then I painted this orange color. The surface elsewhere has a texture to it, because of all the layers of marks. I didn’t want the pole to have the same texture as the rest of the painting, because I wanted it to become more illusionistic.

Back to your question about the conversation with the piece. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I had this very blank composition, meaning that it was just a big dark expanse with a bunch of layers of marks on it. And somehow, I felt that the image wanted to be divided in a kind of dramatic way, so I added this pole-shaped object. And I wanted the object to be dimensional in a very different way from the rest of the painting. The picture seemed to be demanding its own set of rules or principles – it seemed to want to demonstrate a certain law of existence. In this case, what I mean by that is that the orange pole divides the space in a way where light can only exist on the lower side of it. I haven’t decided which direction that pole is sweeping in, but it would either be sweeping light into the space, or it would be sweeping the light out of the space.

Lauren: I recently read something where you were talking about waiting to hear what a painting needed. You said it had been calling for something. After some months, it spoke to you. I was wondering how that came to you.

linn: Yes, it was this bar up here that I added.

Archive of Surrender, by linn meyers, 2024, 62 x 51 inches, acrylic ink on linen. Image courtesy of Jason Haam.

I love this painting. I’m very particular about the way that the image area meets the edge of the object. I don’t want it to feel like it’s a wallpaper sample, like it could be on repeat. I want it to be a defined space. There was something about the top edge of this image that sort of petered out into the distance, and that felt incomplete. I also wanted to emphasize the architecture that’s happening here. It sat in the studio for about four months in this fake, unfinished state. [laughs] I wasn’t entirely satisfied, but the painting looked finished, and it was stretched, and it was ready to ship, but I just didn’t feel right about it. A photographer came to photograph it. Then, a week later, I was like, “Something doesn’t feel right.” So, I added another element. I just couldn’t figure out what the painting wanted for such a long time.

All of the works are intended to live in a kind of ambiguous space – both familiar and unfamiliar. It’s both an object and a space. I’m really interested in those qualities of ambiguity. But sometimes things become too ambiguous – when I don’t know what I’m looking at. A lot of times, when that happens, I’ll sit with the piece, and I’ll make some notes in my sketchbook or maybe even make a drawing of the painting.

In the case of this other painting, I was asking, “Why am I making a fan, a folded paper fan? I don’t really understand what this painting is or where I’m going with it.” When I went to rework the piece, I had this epiphany, “Oh, it’s not a fan. It’s a clock.”

Book of Hours, by linn meyers, 2023, 76 x 73.5 inches, acrylic ink on linen. Image courtesy of Jason Haam.

I’m using the word clock very loosely here. It’s a depiction of the passage of time. I just realized last week that there are 24 facets, which is so funny. Totally accidental. When I was actively working on the painting, and I realized that it was a clock, I used that idea to determine the palette, the color that I added to the grayscale. Being out here in California, I’m always very aware of the color of the light changing, especially in the evening. My apartment faces west. The light in the evening gets really colorful; it’s quite beautiful.

Lauren: When I first saw the clock part, it looked to me like some sort of prismatic array of light, like fractals. That was the first word that came to me. Fractals. It looks illuminated.

linn: That’s awesome. My definition of time is change. You see change within this – from one end to the other, moving across it. The idea of fractals makes perfect sense to me. There was a curator here the other day who was sitting on the sofa staring at this for a while, while we were chatting. Then, we approached it. She said she had been looking at it and thinking about the way that light glints off of water, which I loved.

Lauren: Absolutely. It also looks like there could be a veil that’s being drawn over the water.

linn: Yes, for sure.

Lauren: It also looks a bit like those bioluminescent aquatic beings on the ocean floor, where it is otherwise very dark.

linn: I love that. People ask if I want the works, the images, to evoke specific things or places – I think the pictures will do that no matter what, because that’s how our brains work. We search for what’s familiar, and we search for patterns. There’s no point in resisting that. I mean, I’m really engaged in painting, in the activity of painting and in the activity of image-making. I resist the term abstraction because these, to me, are so tied to my activities and my life that they don’t feel abstract at all. They feel very real.

Lauren: And they have a vitality or dynamism that’s alive, like the rest of your life?

linn: The way that the images develop is so indebted to the process, and, to me, that’s very concrete. But I do know that they’re not representational. Maybe it’s just a glitch in our language that there isn’t a single word for this, that I know of.

Lauren: Instead of representing something else, instead of being an abstract or representational repertoire – for, say, sunrise or rebirth or the start of some new process of emergence – it just is that.

linn: Exactly, it just is that. Maybe the right word is index. It’s an index of the time spent and the movement and the relationship and all the things that were happening at the time when the piece was made. And it’s an index of the way that paint moves across the surface, whether it’s a vertical or horizontal surface, whether it’s pooling or dripping. Maybe that’s a better way of thinking about it.

Lauren: That’s beautiful. Do you ever get visions of the pieces before they are born on the canvas – for example, in your mind’s eye or in your dream state or even in your outer vision, if you’re staring at a blank canvas? Sometimes, people will talk about seeing outlines of things that they then trace over or otherwise create.

linn: I was listening to a podcast the other day, and they were talking about this term, aphantasia. It’s when you can’t picture something in your mind’s eye. I’d never heard this word before, but I have experienced that. I’ve been aware of it for more than ten years. I realized it one day when I was trying to picture my child’s face, and I realized I can’t. The example that they used during the podcast to discuss this is asking a person to close their eyes and picture an apple and then describe what they see. I can describe an apple, but if I close my eyes and picture one, it’s very, very difficult. It feels really forced. It does not come naturally to me.

Lauren: This is fascinating to me, for many reasons. One is because, when I look at your pieces, they sometimes remind me of certain things that I will see in my mind’s eye while in a meditative state. I guess I assumed, without knowing, that you saw these things in your mind’s eye and then rendered them in your works.

linn: It’s more like I have an idea that I want to execute, and then I try to follow the steps in order to make that happen. The thing is that it can’t be forced. I generally don’t try to coerce things within the paintings because I know it’s not going to take me to a place of satisfaction. The times that I’ve tried to “have my way,” it never works out. I end up spending a lot of time in a frustrated place. So, I just don’t do that.

Lauren: It’s like the sovereignty of the piece. It has these places that it just will not go.

linn: Yes, I love that idea of sovereignty. That’s a great word for what I’m trying to describe.

Lauren: Or maybe if a concept of will is too anthropomorphic, you could say the piece has principles that it doesn’t want violated?

linn: Exactly. I do use that word, principles. That was what I was thinking about with the piece that I’m working on right now with the orange bar, having its own set of principles.

Lauren: With your pieces, I get such a sense of the interplay, or maybe even the mirroring, of the micro and the macro scales, almost like looking into the world’s most powerful microscope, which perhaps doesn’t even exist yet, and then also gazing into outer space, with traces of cosmic dust, or with the unevenness of space-time revealing itself through the grids in your pieces.

linn: I started working with a light-on-dark palette many years ago, probably close to 20 years ago. When I did that, the works immediately drew a relationship to the night sky, to the heavens, that sort of imagery. And I wondered, “Why?” I’m not an astronomer.I finally came to this recognition that it is more connected to my interest in ephemerality. The site-specific works that I’ve done are all very engaged with those concerns in a more obvious way. The wall drawings have expiration dates. They’re not intended to be archival. When I make them, the idea is that they will only exist for a very limited period of time. That set of concerns was one of the driving forces to begin making those pieces. That, and also my interest in architecture and the way that our bodies move through space.

I realized that the imagery that references a night sky or the heavens is actually connected to those same concerns, and is connected to our smallness in the world and our brief existence here on this planet.

Lauren: That’s amazing. The vastness is humbling. Do human figures come into any of your pieces?

linn: Only in the way that I, or a viewer, moves in front of the work.

Recently, when we were installing the piece at The Kreeger Museum, we were having a lot of trouble with the light because that painting, in particular, has a bit of sheen on it. We were working so hard to light it in such a way that one could stand still in front of the picture and there would be no glare. But I found that I had to move around the piece in order to experience it fully without the lighting conditions interfering. I was moving when I made the piece, and in order to understand it fully, it’s actually valuable for viewers to move in front of it so that they can see it in total.

I worked on a site-specific project about six years ago at The Bowdoin College Museum of Art that was a wall drawing, like the one that I did at the Hirshhorn and others that I’ve done. But in the case of the Bowdoin project, there was a second element, a collaborative project that I did with three other artists, one of whom is a sound designer, and another is an engineer who creates apps. We created an app called Listening Glass. You can still download it if you have an iPhone. Basically, the idea is that visitors to the museum would download this app onto their iPhone, and then, when they would sweep their phone across the surface of the drawing, it would create sound that came out of their phone, and it also triggered large speakers in the gallery space that made other, deeper sounds. So, you could sort of play the drawing like an instrument, either alone or with other people in the room. We designed the app to intuitively encourage visitors to use their phone in a gesture that was very similar to the gestures that I had used in making the drawing so that it was like another point of entry for people.

Lauren: That’s amazing – a multisensorial portal for the art. In general, do you sometimes hear your art? Do you ever have a sonic experience or, say, hear music, while you’re looking at your art?

linn: I’m not a very musical person. I haven’t played an instrument since I was a kid, and I can’t listen to music while I work because it’s almost like the music has its own tempo, and then I have my tempo, and then there’s almost a moiré pattern that happens between the two. So, it becomes really distracting for me to listen to music while I work. But I think of the pieces as having qualities of sound. They have a cadence, and they have mood. For whatever it’s worth, my favorite instrument is the drums, which kinda makes sense.

Lauren: That’s fascinating. Before we end, could you share how being a visual artist came to you?

linn: Well, up until high school, I was a dancer. I’ve always made art. I’ve always been a visual artist, but I was a pretty serious dancer. Then, I had some injuries, which I think, in the end, just gave me more time to work on my visual art. I ended up enrolled in a half-day art program at a nearby public high school. I went to my neighborhood high school for my academic classes. At lunchtime, I would leave, and I would go to a different public high school that was just a studio class. It just seemed so obvious – like, of course, this is what I’m going to do with my life.

I worked as a studio assistant for a number of different artists while I was in art school in New York. I also had an internship with a printmaker at one point, and with an art conservator, and also at a gallery. I’m pretty sure that in the back of my head, I was thinking, “Well, I’m testing this out to see if this could be a way to pay my bills when I’m done with art school.” And in each case, I was like, “Nope.” [laughs] The studio assistant thing was fine. I actually enjoyed that the most. But making a living as an artist is such a crazy thing to try and do, and if you’re working for people who are doing that, then you’re putting yourself in a pretty unstable position. I’m not sure if I had that much clarity about it, but I quit my last studio assistant job just before they fired the entire crew because they had run out of money!

I never thought I was going to make a living as an artist. I also never really thought I was going to teach. I went to graduate school, and in my second year, I remember having this realization that everybody else was there because they wanted to be qualified to teach at the college level. It had never occurred to me. [laughs] I lack sensibility. I was like, “Oh, that’s why we’re here. That’s not why I’m here. I’m just here to learn how to be a better painter.”

At that point, I was waiting tables to pay my bills, and I always figured that I’d just be doing that forever. Then, about 27 years ago, I had what, at the time, seemed like a total windfall – out of the blue, I sold enough work to survive for six months. I was waiting tables at the time, and I thought, “I’ll be full-time in the studio until the money runs out, and then I’ll find another restaurant job.” And then, I just didn’t have to. I’ve done gigs from time to time. I’ve just been extremely fortunate. Very, very fortunate. I mean, my goal is just to keep making the very best work that I can make, to keep this crazy project going.

Path of Totality, by linn meyers, 2023, acrylic ink and colored pencil on linen, 24.25 x 38.25. Image courtesy of Jason Haam.