Untitled piece by Meg Kremer from the upcoming show of her work. CourtesyLIBRARY News:
The Upstairs Art Gallery of Los Alamos Mesa Public Library presents New Work by Los Alamos artist Meg Kremer. The show opens to the public Monday, June 3 and runs through June 29, with an artist’s reception at 2 p.m. Sunday, June 9.
The exhibit is a selection of elegant and evocative drawings and prints from a project started in November 2011 and ending in January 2013.
“The work is the result of a disciplined process producing one or two drawings a day,” Kremer said. “Each piece focused on the discovery of line and form and explored the evolution of abstracting 12 selected objects over the days and weeks. The subject of each piece was an arrangement of organic and inorganic material such as dried wild flowers and stems collected along the White Rock Canyon rim and sand dollars and smooth stones from an Oregon beach. Some work has a serious feel to it, others are whimsical. Many have a lyrical quality.”
The work is rendered in a predominately square format using a limited color palette; this constraint provided a physical structure for the series. The mixed media work includes graphite, pen and ink, colored pencil, and oil based inks, sometimes alone, sometimes in combinations. Line, mark making, and design are emphasized and much of the work is abstract in form.
“The challenge of creating work, every day, over an extended period of time provided the premise and purpose of the series and also reinforced the discipline, the frustration, and the joy of working,” Kremer said.
Kremer’s studio space is usually without much clutter and she surrounds herself with a lot of white wall. To select work for this show she had all of the drawings photographed and printed in black and white on standard card stock. Some 200 images were hung from a clothes line over the walls and lived with for several weeks. The pieces chosen for the show feature mark making techniques and effective shapes.
Kremer has been working as an artist since the mid-1980s and settled in Los Alamos in 1995 after studying drawing and illustration with Joan Kimura and David Passalacqua. She has shown locally and in New York. Although usually not prolific, her work is in private collections.
