Artwork copyright Mark Meyer. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, 2016.

Artwork copyright Mark Meyer. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Paleo, 1991

Mark Meyer
American (born 1947)

Location: Washington State Arts Commission, Olympia

About the Artwork

Paleo is a mixed media painting created by artist Mark Meyer. This piece plays with images and themes relating to fossils, decay, and growth. He notes, "It's really difficult to know how things were tens to hundreds of millions of years ago, but you can play artistically with images, textures, and forces to summon up a general feeling of the ancient world under the ground." This painting is part of Meyer's body of small-scale paintings featuring annotated borders. The doodles, text, and color patches outline his many creative pathways, improvisations, and experiments. He describes these borders as "a testing ground for colors, ideas, random thoughts, and stylistic organization."

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with Clover Park School District.

About the Artist

Seattle-based artist Mark Meyer creates intricately detailed, pattern-driven paintings, drawings and digital prints.