linn meyers
detail image of Untitled, 2021, 78 x 66 inches, acrylic ink on panel, private collection
MS: I’ve never been to L.A.
lm: Oh my god, really?
MS: Yeah, seriously, and I've always had this fantasy about moving out there. The northeast is great for a lot of reasons, but I grew up on the west coast, and I love the idea of being in like a perpetual summer.
lm: L.A. is just culturally so much different from anything that I've ever been around.
I'd spent some time here, on and off, and I went to grad school in Northern California. Then I came to L.A. in 2022 for a month-long residency and I loved the energy. My partner had a sabbatical coming up a few months later, so we decided that we would just drive out here with the pets and find temporary housing and a studio. By the end of that semester I was sort of thinking, I want to stay here.
Now I split my time between DC and LA, and my partner is living and working in Texas. We're sort spread all over the country.
I did a bunch of cross-country trips when I was younger, and each time, it sort of reminds me of the vastness of the United States, and how many cultures exist here. In Europe the countries are smaller and each one generally has its own language, and I never find myself surprised when the culture and language shift as I cross a border - it’s expected. In the US those shifts are more gradual, but California feels like a whole separate culture from the rest of the country. It's not just a vibe - it’s almost like the social contracts are different out here.
When I drove out to Northern California for grad school, back in the 90’s, I actually avoided driving through to Southern California. I only associated it with Hollywood. Being such a committed north-easterner, I had that kind of standard wariness about SoCal.
So the first time I really experienced L.A. was in 2011, when I was installing my show at the Hammer Museum. I kind of fell in love with the place.
These days it’s very lively. It has this sort of DIY thing, not exactly like NY in the 80’s, but not entirely different. To be honest, I’m surprised by the freshness of the energy here. I do believe, though, that the way a person experiences this city is totally different depending on what industry they are a part of.
MS: Completely. You know, it's funny because we have friends out there, but we never find the time to visit. Megan Mueller and Sam Scharf are friends of mine. My friend Matt Allison moved out there years ago for grad school. Lily and I are always looking at their photos. It’s pretty appealing. I would like to be able to dip out of the city to explore some of the some of the country around it. I would love to be able to go into the desert. It would be great to drive down to the coast to photograph.
Anyway, what are your studio routines like?
lm: I work a lot at night. When I was out at the Ucross Foundation residency last month, there were several of us that were nocturnal. We would pretty much stay in our studios until 2 a.m., and then we'd walk back to the main house together. It was less than a mile through a big field. Totally starry nights, beautiful. On the walks home we had these conversations about how the world isn't really set up for people who are nocturnal. I'm curious what you think about that?
MS: Yeah. I totally agree. I also work at night. I’ve always been that way. I understand what you mean. Most people don’t operate that way. I think being a night person is kind of like being an introvert. The world isn’t very accommodating to either night people or introverts. Lily and I often joke that the world was set up by extroverts, for extroverts.
I’ve tried to adjust my studio schedule several times. At different points when I had to be at work at 7 or 8am. I thought my studio schedule would have to adapt. Of course it did to some extent, but it was always difficult to shut my mind off at night when I wanted to be working.
lm: I always feel a kinship with people if they also work at night. I think it’s a particular type of person.
MS: Definitely. Last year, I curated a show at Fairfield University called Night After Night. The show was about drawing, but specifically drawing late at night. Being a night person, and drawing during those hours, the feeling of that tends to seep into the work a little bit.
lm: Do you know this artist, Robert Yarber?
MS: Not offhand.
lm: I think he was the first person I ever met who was unapologetically and publicly nocturnal. And I remember when I went to his loft for a job interview, he basically was like, okay, so when you come to work, I'll be sleeping, and here's a key, and you can let yourself in. It made perfect sense, because that's when he was asleep, like he literally wouldn't get up until two o'clock in the afternoon. Yeah, he was serious about it. And, as I said, unapologetically embraced it.
MS: I appreciate that. I think there's that puritanical thing that's attached to getting up early. That used to make sense, but it's funny that we continue to hold onto it. It’s not a moral issue, and yet, people turn it into one. Working at night, and sleeping during the day is considered antisocial. I’m still not very public about it.
lm: Maybe it's easier to do that when you're older, because when you're young, it just reads is like, oh, you're a fucking slacker. When you get older, it's like, this is actually when I work and you have to take this seriously.
MS: Yeah, I teach, but I don't start until 11am which is perfect. But I always feel a little bit guilty because I'm still drinking my morning coffee when we start, and it's pretty evident that I got up like two hours ago.
What hour of the day do you usually start to settle in on, on a drawing?
lm: I do my admin work in the morning. You know, when I get up I try to at least look at email, and if there's anything urgent that needs to be addressed, I try to do that in the morning. After I wrap up my morning administrative work, I take a break and walk my dog, and then I come back in and I settle into the studio.
I often start by reading. I usually read some poetry before I start to paint or draw. It seems like things come into focus around mid-afternoon.
untitled, 2020, acrylic ink on panel, 41 x 33 inches, private collection
MS: Yeah, I can relate to what you mentioned about reading, because that's how I gear up for studio as well. Usually I’m reading some kind of art criticism, or I'll be reading about another artist that is influencing my work. The way that I start working is by testing something that I’m reading about. I’ll get motivated to work because I want to apply what I’ve read to something I'm working on. I'll start to rip off of one of their ideas and then find my own stride after that.
lm: Oh, I'm so envious of that. So like, can you give me a concrete example? I don't have that in my practice.
MS: Absolutely. There's an artist that I was just looking at the other day, Ray K. Metzker, who is a photographer that I’m enjoying. I was reading about his work, and he was doing this interesting thing where there was an extreme figure ground shift in his photos. The foreground elements were almost blurred out beyond recognition, and then these things in the negative spaces and in the background would be extremely sharp.
There's a nature preserve about six blocks from me, so I grabbed my camera and I went down there to practice the technique. I didn’t have any intention to use any of the photos. It was just a way to warm up.
Almost every studio day I'll sort of start out by mimicking something that somebody else did. Most of the time it’s just a way to get going, but sometimes I fold it into my work. It’s really just a prompt to get started, but every now and then, it spins off into something with potential.
lm: That’s so nice. I remember when I started grad school and I was obsessed with this painter that was showing in New York at the time. My grad school mentor recommended that make a painting as though I were this artist whose work I was infatuated with. That assignment totally demystified the whole thing for me. My fascination with that artist just evaporated. It was really interesting.
MS: I think that I've had similar experiences. I grew up in an area where, l had no access to art museums. My exposure to art until my mid-20’s was strictly in books. As a result I really elevated certain types of painting. This artwork definitely deserved my admiration, but my thinking toward it was unrealistic. I was psyching myself out. Once I started to see the stuff in person on a regular basis, it really humanized it. I could understand how it was made.
lm: Most technique can be understood pretty quickly. My fascination with other artists’ work is rarely around the technique, It's almost always more like, How the fuck did you even think of that?
MS: I’ve thought a lot about which influences of mine have stayed with me for the longest period of time. I wonder what creates that relationship with certain artwork where the fascination never goes away?
In a lot of cases, they're not artists that I was immediately attached to. Sometimes they're people that I was aware of for a long time, and I didn't really feel one way or the other about their work. Then all of a sudden, it started to resonate with me. With artwork I look for a slow burn, and that takes time to develop.
I have a pretty diverse taste in art. I like a lot of things because they’re just made so differently than the way that I operate.
lm: I love excellent craft. I sort of need that. It’s satiating when something is carefully crafted. If the execution is careless, or there are gaps in the craft, I feel like that interrupts my experience of the work. Not that I don’t dig messy, but it just needs to feel very real, whatever that means.
MS: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When I lived in Philadelphia, there's very much of a DIY kind of thing. That’s great and I completely support that, but sometimes I felt like careful execution was looked down upon. The DIY thing was the esthetic. The presentation had to be rough around the edges, or it was not taken seriously.
It almost seemed like it was equated with intelligence. You know, that if you went out of your way to refine what it was you were saying, then it was watered down or lacked edge.
I grew resentful of that after a time. Craft is a way to really get a viewer to stop and look. Part of the draw is that it’s well made. I want to see a certain level of investment in what an artist has made. If I don't sense that level of investment from somebody, then I don't really feel invested as a viewer, right?
lm: Right. It’s not about polish, it's about intentionality. Absolutely.
MS: Completely. It’s the same in my studio. Finished work is the result of many rehearsals that lead up to a moment of execution. Over the course of those rehearsals, I refine the objective and build familiarity with the execution. I’m not looking for studio perfectionism. If a piece calls for spontaneity, there’s a way to do that so that those actions bond with good craft.
lm: It’s really, as you said, I want there to be zero distractions for a person when they are gazing at the work.
There’s that little graph paper drawing that I that I showed you. It was the first thing that I did when I got to Ucross. When I was making that, it was late at night, and I spilled some ink on the back of the paper, and I was so pissed, but it was just along the
the margin. I thought, whatever, it's fine. Like, I’m the only one who’s gonna notice that. And then I sort of pretended it wasn't there, and I got the drawing back here to LA and hung it up on the wall. And I was like, I'm actually not okay with that. But my dissatisfaction ended up being an asset, because I worked on the back of the drawing and I ended up extending the image up to the top edge of the front of the paper. Somehow it had more depth after I did that. It’s stuff that only another artist would notice.
MS: The opinions of other artists are what matter most to me. So, if another artist would notice it, then it matters. But, It’s a fine line with that stuff. The pursuit of perfection can be the enemy of creativity. There are times where I get really frustrated with that part of myself.
I sometimes wish that I had this punk rock approach to things. That I could separate myself and not care. But I don't operate that way. At this point I accept that I need a level of refinement in my work. That's just how I am with it.
lm: I sometimes feel like I have to be shaken loose. It's part of why I work on such a large scale. With smaller works I can find myself getting pulled into a kind of detail that isn’t helping my case. The larger paintings require a different kind of gesture that travels through my body and into a different part of my brain.
What I look for in my own work, and in the work of others, is humanity; and humanity is full of imperfections.
MS: Yeah, I completely relate to what you're saying. My perspective on good craft is often misunderstood as material fussiness. It’s not that. I appreciate human presence in the work. I think good craft is closely related to work ethic. Anything resembling laziness in artwork is unacceptable.
However, my insistence on this stuff has become a problem before. I’ve had to completely shift media several times in my art life, because I would get preoccupied with material issues. My studio pursuit had unintentionally become about material perfection. That was a really boring and frustrating way to work. It was clouding my ability to think about any of the stuff that I actually wanted to think about.
Like yourself, I work mostly on paper. I’d start getting out new pieces of paper and scanning them for any kind of scratch, or anything that may interrupt the work once it got going. It was way out of hand. It was one of the reasons that I started working with photography. Because I could set up scenarios that were very messy, but then the print itself was a moment where I could really tighten up and focus on craft. When I was in the dark room I could create something very precise and clean.
lm: Yeah, that, that makes perfect sense. I think the parallel for me would be my approach to mark making. There was a series of drawings that I started around 25 years ago that I referred to as gravity drawings. And they were basically just images composed of vertical lines made without the guidance of a straight edge or ruler. I made them with a kind of intentional consciousness of the soles of my feet and the pressure of my feet on the floor. One of the ideas was that gravity was doing a lot of the work for me, if I really engaged with it in an intentional way.
After making them for some time, I got a little too good at it, and the drawings became less interesting. When I had begun making those works, I believed that the work needed to harness invisible forces like gravity, but at a certain point, the story shifted and I started to think about working in opposition to an invisible force. So I began making horizontal line drawings, which was much more challenging.
After a while, I got good at those too! So, you know, it's like that. I guess one of the risks that runs through my practice is getting a little bit too refined in a mark making technique. When I start something new, there are imperfections and slips. When those begin to disappear, I have to sort of find a new point of tension.
Untitled, 2006, ink on Mylar, approx 16 x 14 inches / Untitled, 2005, ink on Mylar, 14 x 17 inches
MS: I really savor a particular time in the studio where I have some experience making something, but I'm still not really able to completely define what it is. At that moment the work is a little bit mysterious to me. There's still a feeling that there's some stuff to be discovered, but I’m also not a complete beginner either. It’s probably a time that I enjoy because I’m not stressed over the quality of the work yet. I can acknowledge that it’s not ready yet, but that it’s building toward something.
My work can be pretty deadpan at times. Photography works well for me because it allows me to embrace the accidental, without sacrificing technique. The objects that I’m photographing can be very expressive without my hand directly involved. In that way I don’t have to try and express something. It just happens.
One thing that I relate to in your work, is this kind of tension between the systematic and the accidental. I've often talked to people about how part of the way that I find freedom is through routine. The routine gets me into a place where I stop thinking so much about what I'm doing, and the momentum of the work begins to develop on it’s own. That was something that I was kind of curious to talk to you about?
Untitled, ink and Flashe on panel, 72" x 62", private collection
lm: For sure. I have this post-it note in my studio in DC that says “freedom is a discipline”. As you were speaking, I was thinking, could I turn that inside out? Could discipline be the freedom? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that that works for me.
I have ideas about what I want to make, and opinions about what I make, and some parts interest me more than others. So much of what I end up making is really driven by the technique and then there's an editing process of my own technique. And when I say editing, sometimes that involves removing sections. And sometimes editing is more about a choice of which direction, which path to take. I'll see a fork in the road, and then I'll have to make a decision about where the drawing or painting is going to go.
I don't start most paintings with a particular idea beyond the most basic outline of a beginning. Whether it's the palette, or a very basic quality of composition.
I'd love to have the kind of practice where I’m drawing from historical references, or from pictures I've taken, or sketches I've made.
That's not how I usually work, though. In fact, I don’t usually make sketches that lead to paintings, instead, the paintings lead to sketches. For instance, if I’m not sure what direction a large painting is taking, if I don’t understand it, I'll make drawings of the painting to try to see it more clearly.
I’m really envious of artists who have an image in their mind of exactly what it is that they want to make. The idea of not having to face a blank canvas is so appealing, but so distant for me most of the time.
It's hard not to feel sort of confined by certain descriptions like systematic. What I’m doing these days is not exactly systematic, it’s more like tipping over dominoes. I'll have a lineup of things that I think may happen, but I have to move forward with the piece to see what’s actually going to transpire on the surface. Then all of the small accidental things that happen along the way are genuine and honest.
MS: A bit of what you were saying reminded me of these cue cards that I keep my classroom. They are lists of the visual elements and principles of design. I encourage the students to think less about subject matter and more about those elements and principles.
Instead of stressing what they are going to choose as a subject, I try to emphasize how they are going to deal with the subject; how they are going to use the elements and principles of design to interact with the subject. So the question becomes, not what you are going to draw, but how are you are going to draw it. The subject is almost incidental.
lm: I love that idea of using visual design as a prompt that sets the subject off in a certain way.
MS: Thank you. I always show my students your work in a slide show at the beginning of the semester. I present it on the first day. It’s a talk on some of the artists that I really admire. They are artists that I want to share with the students for specific reasons. One of the reasons that I like to show your work in that presentation, is that it starts to break apart the division between representation and abstraction.
lm: It’s so nice to hear you say that.
MS: Yeah. My students are always immediately interested in your work. I show some detail images of your work, and we end up talking a lot about how there is a dot, and how that dot is both representational and abstract at the same time.
On the one hand, it's just undeniably, factually a dot. On the other hand, it’s bonding together with the other dots to create the illusion of space. Something factual becomes something invented as the sum of all these parts come together.
Part of the reason that I brought this up is how we can find freedom in things that are systematic. I’ve always imagined that the development of illusionistic space in your work happens mostly on its own. You set up a situation, and then let the piece develop on its own. The ripples and undulations of different patterns unfold organically as the piece is being made. There's a kind of freedom in doing something where you don't have to be fussy about the result, because you've already established the parameters, and anything that happens inside of those parameters is fair game.
lm: Yeah. I think that's, that's systems, right? There was a period where my systems were very clearly determined. They were laid out beforehand. This was more when I was working only in drawing. I was working almost exclusively with ink and colored pencil on frosted Mylar. I would set up a system, and then I would see it through.
The whole point was a sort of undeniability of it. One of the things that happened was what I was describing before, using the gravity drawings as an example. I got a little bit too good at my own systems and the evidence of me, as a human who had made the image, began to disappear with that mastery of the technique. Then there was also this moment when I reconsidered the value of improvisation. I started thinking about how much I love other art forms that are dependent on the absence of a system.
I invited that improvisation back into my studio. I started thinking about music and how, when it's reduced to systems, like American minimalists, can start to feel so mechanical and flattened out. Not that I don’t love that music, but for me it lacks certain qualities that I long for in visual art.
That’s what I'm looking for when I read poetry or listen to music. I'm looking for a broader view. I don't want to just look at the blades of grass. I want to see the field, and that requires an opening up. Sometimes systems-based work shuts down that possibility.
Untitled, 2019, Acrylic ink and Flashe on panel, 72" x 60", private collection
MS: That makes sense. In a previous interview you talked about reaching a point where you had to reconsider the intuitive. I can see that.
The works in progress that you showed me in your studio, the initial layers of color are so much different than I would have thought.
lm: A lot of what I what I tend to kind of look for in people's work, is the evidence of making. I don't want to look at something where all signs of the maker have been erased from it.
MS: As a teacher, I have conversations with students where the question of style comes up. Most teachers try to prevent students from becoming overly concerned with style. I tell students not to be concerned with style, because it's going to emerge no matter what. The evidence of your hand is in the thing. It's going to be there no matter what. You don’t have to try to find it.
lm: Yeah, don’t let me ever find my style. I always want to be a bit of a mystery to myself. It’s painful to not know where I’m going. That’s what I experience I'd say 90% of the time. I have no clue where I'm headed. But there’s that 10% where all of a sudden, the horizon opens up, and you can see exactly where you're going. It's like a pin on a map, and all you have to do is get there is find that 10%. It might not even be 10%. It's probably less. But whatever that thing is, it’s the best thing in the world.
MS: That’s a great way to describe it.
lm: All the messiness, all the self-doubt, that all needs to be there in order to have that other experience.
MS: Yeah, absolutely. If you're on the same path, day in and day out, there's going to be a point at which that path has nothing more to reveal to you. Once the path becomes like a commute that you take in order to finish a piece then it’s time to move on.
Sometimes I have the opposite problem. I have to discipline myself to stay on the same path for a little while. I want to be thorough enough to make sure that I find out about all the different possibilities each studio project has to offer. You begin a new studio project knowing nothing, and then you build experience. Then there is a great period of time where you know enough to make high quality work, but there’s still some mystery left in the process. Sooner or later, there will be a tipping point where you know too much and the work becomes stale.
I often jump off too early and move onto some other studio project before my work is really done. My portfolio is a mess because of it. There are huge shifts in my work over the last 15 years. I often loose confidence in a project, and I move on to another idea before it’s really time.
Or, I can be past the tipping point for a couple of years before I realize it. Working on something that has become really boring, but there’s a security in knowing how to do it. There are these big throw away portions of my studio work. The years 2018 to 2023, were not good years. I but I don't ever realize this stuff when I'm in the middle of it. It’s only after the fact that I can see it.
lm: We can't see it while we're there. I mean, these artists that are making the same thing year, after year, after year, because they know how to do it and their work sells. That's a whole other kind of Hell. It’s really limiting. I haven't ever experienced that problem, exactly, but the question of just remaining somewhere because it's safe and I feel like I know what's going on there - that’s definitely something that I can imagine getting drawn into.
Installation view of "Paintings for Uncertain Times" at Jason Haam, Seoul, Korea / Large painting: Unfolding Refrain, 2022, 77.25 x 109 inches, acrylic ink on linen / Small painting: Drift Force, 2024, 20 x 16 inches, acrylic ink on wedge-shaped panel
MS: That thing that you mentioned earlier about shifting scale is something that I think can help a lot. I don't want to say that it’s a fix for it, because it does’t work every time. But, taking big steps without a lot of intermediary work leading up to it can shake things up. Scaling up from a 12 x 12 inch drawing to a 60 x 60 inch drawing will usually breathe some life into something.
lm: It always comes back to putting ourselves in a precarious position. That area of balance between confidence and insecurity, I think, is always at play in an artist’s studio.
It's very rare to be in that position where I know what I'm doing, and I'm making good work, and I'm barreling forward, and I'm breaking new ground. Usually, in order to make really good paintings, I have to be in a place of precarity.
MS: I’m getting to a place where I can accept the ebb and flow of the quality of my work. For me, it has a little something to do with how much I'm introducing new elements into the work. I've noticed that there's a build up in my work, and past a certain point it gets bad. Too many ideas get stacked up and the work starts to suffer. At a certain point I've overdone it. A lot of the time I don’t realize it and just keep adding to something, and the foundation can’t handle it.
Eventually, I'll start to strip away at it and reduce the work back down. My best work happens somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. It’s somewhere between being too stripped down and too built up.
Sometimes I shift materials to get around the problem. When I do that, there will be a learning curve with the new material. It will take some time to develop. At some point, I find my stride and the work takes off for a period of time. The studio is a real pleasure during those times. Eventually, I overload it and it starts to break up. I used to try and fix my methods in order to say in that good place, but that just can't be done. It's got to kind of be accepted that at first it will be lacking, then it’ll get good, and then it'll get overworked.
lm: The thing that is so hard about being an artist, for me, is not the unpredictable income and all the obvious things. It's that it requires a kind of insecurity of me that can't ever go away.
MS: Definitely. It's funny, because I used to fantasize about getting to this place where I’m on a steady wave in the studio that lasts for years. Where I’m in this flow state, and I’m really invested in what I'm doing, but there's very little turbulence. A place where, I'm comfortable, and my portfolio is developing in a good and predictable way.
I've quit looking for that. Of course, I still want it, but I know that it would be probably bad for me if I had it. If every single piece rolls out of the studio a success, then I'm not going to get to feel the way that I do when something does hit the mark. I’m not sure if I’d want to give that feeling up just so that the work is predictably good every time I’m in the studio.
There is one thing I wanted to ask you about. I think it relates to what we're talking about. I know that you've done some printmaking, and printmaking, for me has always been a great way to disrupt the routine. I was just wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you got involved in print making?
Untitled, 2022, Acrylic ink on panel, 84 x 72 inches, private collection
lm: Yeah. I started out as a printmaker. Actually, what happened was, when I was in high school, I got introduced to litho and etching through a program at the Smithsonian.
At the time, a printmaker named Scip Barnhart was a teaching these techniques to public high school students – the classes took place in the basement of the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, they called the program Discover Graphics. I learned the basics of lithography and etching from him. I was always kind of a draftsperson, so printmaking made sense. When I applied to Cooper Union, I applied as a printmaking major, even though it wasn't required that you identified a major there.
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Cooper Union, I interned at a print shop on the Lower East Side. I loved being in the shop, but I discovered very quickly that it was the wrong medium for me. As a printmaker you would know this: you really have to be tuned into technique. I guess there's always been a part of me that values the haphazard, and there's no space for that in printmaking. I learned later on that that only really relates to editioning prints - that precision of technique is not required of all printmakers. Anyway, I kept on making prints through college and afterward I was renting press time at Bob Blackburn's workshop in New York.
But then maybe 10 years after college I decided that I wasn’t printing frequently enough to remember how to use the equipment properly. I was worried that I was going to break a press or something. So I actually made a decision not to make prints until I could work with a master printer. I gave it up for a bunch of years, and then I got lucky - I was invited to do a residency at the Tamarind Institute.
The thing about Tamarind is that it's collaborative printmaking. I hadn't had any experiences with collaborative printmaking, and I discovered that I just loved it. If you're working with the right person, a really talented collaborative print maker is like a soothsayer or something. They're really special people. I that's how I got back into it.
When I was in my early 30’s, a print publisher in Washington DC wanted to publish some work with me. We were looking around for a master printmaker and we were interviewing a guy, and in the middle of the interview I realized he was Scip Barnhart, the printmaker who taught me when I was in high school! I told him we had met many years ago, and he walked over to a flat file and pulled out a print that I made when I was in high school.
MS: No way? So you remembered each other at the same time?
LM: Yeah, I guess! And then we made a bunch of editions together after that. I think of printmaking now as an opportunity for collaboration, and it’s a place to discover things that are right in front of me, but that I might not notice because I’m too close to the medium of painting. So, when I shift to printmaking, all of the sudden certain things get magnified or rediscovered.
I’m actually going back to Tamarind to do my fourth residency there in June. I’m so psyched about it. The person who runs the shop is amazing. It’s a great place.
MS: Yeah, I follow Tamarind on Instagram, and anther artist, Mike Nudelman, who was just on Volume did a residency there. I would love to do a residency there. Printmaking is such a great way to disrupt that problem of mastery that we were talking about earlier. It introduces a level of unpredictability for me. It’s probably due to lack of skill, but I’m never completely sure of what’s going to happen when I send something through a press. I will make something using my normal materials, and then go to the printmaking lab at the university where I teach and try reproduce it as a monoprint or something. When my practice gets stale, I always turn to printmaking.
lm: Yeah, and the reversal of the image in and of itself is enough to throw you off your mark, but in a good way.
MS: Yeah, there’s a book that I’m reading right now that’s about that. It’s called Contact.
lm: Oh right, Contact, Art And The Pull of Print, by Jennifer Roberts.
MS: Yeah.
lm: Based on her talks at the National Gallery.
MS: It’s been great for my printmaking classes, and it has a lot of cool perspectives. Roberts writes about printmaking themes like pressure, reversal, and interference. It’s about how printmakers confront those things and deal with them to their advantage. It’s great for generating ideas and lesson plans for printmaking.
There’s one other thing that I wanted to ask you about. I see the work that you make on paper. The really small pieces. There’s obvious similarities to your other work, but it also seems like it is a separate body of work. I was wondering if you could talk a little about that?
Untitled triptych, Each panel: 186" x 108", acrylic ink on panel, permanent installation at Columbia Square, Washington, DC.
lm: When I began making large site-specific wall drawings, I needed to have really solid, scaled preparatory sketches for those. My father was an architect, so I was used to seeing things scaled, and I understood the method.
The wall drawing projects always have a timeline for installation, and it’s essential to have a solid plan before I begin. One time, early on, I had made preparatory drawings that weren’t scaled properly, and it got a little scary in terms of how much time I had to figure out the piece on site. That project ended up being very beautiful, but I’m not sure the stress that I experienced was worth it!
So anyway, originally, I had collected a bunch of vintage graph paper that I was using for the scaled prep drawings. Eventually, I was using the graph paper for preparatory drawings that got translated into larger drawings, also.
Then, about a dozen years ago, I was planning a two person show in New York with an artist named Elena del Rivero. At the time I didn’t really know Elena, but the gallery (Sandra Gering) wanted us to do this project together. It wasn’t exactly collaborative, but it was more than just a two person show. I don’t know exactly how to characterize it.
Anyway, a friend suggested that a good way to get to know Elena better would be to do some collaborative drawings. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but the format we chose was the game of exquisite corpse.
We did 8 drawings together. I started 4, and she started 4. I would strike a line in the middle of the surface area and allow my drawing to pour over that line in a few places. I would then mask off my half of the drawing and mail it to Elena and she would do the same for me. So we each responded to a small amount of information in the other person’s drawing, while most of the image was masked off.
The material that I had lying around was graph paper, so that’s what I worked with. The project really loosened me up, and Elena and I got to know each other through the process. It was great.
After that, I ended up doing a broader exquisite corpse project with a bunch of artists, mailing works back and forth. Again, the material that I had around was the graph paper, so I would always end up using that, either as the initial substrate, or, if another artist started the drawing, I would end up collaging with the graph paper. It opened my eyes to the real value of this other practice that I had going on. Suddenly I understood that the graph paper wasn’t just a tool for scaling larger works.
The graph paper drawings have been an integral part of what happens in my studio for close to two decades. And because the materials that I use are limited, and the scale of these works is always about the same, seeing the body of work has a way of magnifying the trajectory of my practice. By limiting the variables, I can really observe how my work has shifted over the past two decades. It’s satisfying to see.
The show that I have up in LA right now, (view Infinity Loop at Make Room HERE) is kind of a dream show. I wanted to find a way to illustrate how the graph paper drawings relate to my practice as a whole. In the case of the show at Make Room gallery, I turned the project room itself into graph paper. Then I hung a selection of the drawings in there, so that there is a sort of inside-outness to the experience.
It’s like this thing that we’re always trying to figure out: How do you live inside this crazy practice that we’re always exploring and trying to understand for ourselves? So it’s an invitation into that. The experience was so satisfying.
installation photos from Make Room in Los Angelas. linn meyers, Untitled, 2019, Ink on graph paper, 11 x 8.5 in and linn meyers, Untitled, 2020, Ink on graph paper 11 x 8.5 in
MS: It’s cool to get some of the backstory on those. I’ve always really admired those.
lm: Thank you.
MS: I think that there’s something very cool about taking something in that has a pre-existing history, that you didn’t control or build up, and then using that as a springboard. I’ve always loved the colors in those older graph papers, but it’s a color that I can never replicate.
It reminds me of an artist who I know. Blaise Rosenthol. I’m organizing a show of his work right now at Fairfield University. He has been collecting hotel stationary from all over the world for years. He makes paintings directly on this stationary. He uses those papers as a through line for this huge variety of paintings. The work all has this printed text from all of these various hotels as a unifying factor.
lm: Oh Cool.
MS: Yeah, and so the hotel printing is this thing that bonds all of these really diverse paintings together. I’ve never really been able to successfully integrate a piece of found paper or something into my work. It’s way more challenging than a person would think. I’ve used tons of found papers in collage, but never really used a found paper as a working surface.
lm: It can be challenging, for sure. There are certain projects that I have tried to do that haven’t worked out at all. A few years ago on Instagram I posted some images of these text pieces that I did.
MS: Yeah, I remember that.
lm: So, those were pulled from a book on Turner published in 1900. It’s this big two volume set. I had carried those around with me since the late 1980s. I wanted to make something using those pages. I failed over and over again. I finally succeeded during the pandemic when I brought the books home and realized that I had only been looking at the plates of Turner’s paintings, and I had been ignoring the written words by Ruskin. We all had these weird experiences during the pandemic, where you had to re-examine these things that were right in front of you for so long.
MS: Using a found paper as a substrate is tough. I’ve done lots of collage where I incorporate found materials. I’ve always wanted to find an object, paper or otherwise, and use that as the foundation for the piece. To use that as the substrate. Where I have struggled with it personally, is that it’s hard to find a real balance between the found object, and my alterations. The difficulty is in getting the two things to merge.
lm: Yes.
MS: Where the personality of the found object is not overtaking the artwork and vice versa. So that it’s not like I’m completely covering the found surface, but it’s also not as though the character of the that I’ve found is not the only thing holding up the art.
lm: That totally describes what was stopping me from doing something with the Turner and Ruskin books. Because I would do something on the image plate, but it always felt wrong. So it’s exactly what you were saying. It’s the balance between the substrate and the work that I was making on top of it. I had to find a place where both things mattered equally.
VOLUME: Thank you to linn meyers for taking the time to speak about her work. To see more of linn’s work visit her website here or instagram account @linnmeyers.