melissa meyer’s paintings have an authority born of long experience. They convey the artist’s clear eye and sure hand. Whether large or small, suffused with color or braced with black, these new paintings extend Meyer’s use of oil paint thinned to the translucency of watercolor yet maintaining saturation and radiance. She describes her approach as follows, acknowledging a long-standing interest in collage: When I’m painting, restrictions are self-imposed, including choices about color, scale, speed of mark, and format. Variation in these approaches allows me to stay true to the threads that connect my work – the visual energy of a collage sensibility and the expressiveness of painting. The way I think about space, layering, abutted gestures, and attributes of color, such as value and intensity of hue, are deeply influenced by the collage actions of cutting, pasting, and arranging in vertical/ horizontal formats. This allows me to isolate elements while building a whole, so that a viewer may experience each part of a painting as dynamically as its entirety. While my painting may initially appear to be fast to a viewer because of the speed of the gestures, attention to each of these elements and what they are doing requires a much slower read. Getting in Line and J. Mulligan, both 78 x 80 inch paintings, seem alike in sharing a patchwork ground of very pale colors under a scaffold of black marks. With the “slower read” Meyer suggests to us, differences in the architecture of the foreground levels become evident. One has a regular rhythm of mostly closed shapes outlined alternatively with the wide edge of the brush or the thin side; the other features a much less regular, jazzy and antic beat. The other two large paintings, Summer in the City I, and II, are also a size-matched pair and are also more dissimilar than they appear at first glance. Meyer cites the “built environment” as