Neil Meitzler Retrospective Art Show & Talk

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Born in Pueblo Colorado in 1930, at the age of five, Neil Meitzler moved with his family to the Northwest where he would spend the majority of his life. From his earliest childhood, he showed an interest in drawing and painting. Though he never received any formal schooling in the arts, in 1953, at the age of 23, he won his first award for painting at a Boeing employee art exhibition where he was working as a draftsman. 

In 1954, Meitzler met established Northwest artist Kenneth Callahan. Callahan became a mentor and introduced him to other significant Northwest artists, including Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Guy Anderson, among others. In time, Meitzler and his own works were included in this company as a second-generation “Northwest School” artist and one of Seattle’s “Mystic Painters.”

Dedicated and prolific, by 1959 Meitzler received a solo show at the Seattle Art Museum. He was also featured in several other exhibitions that year, including the Portland Art Museum’s Centennial exhibition. In the years that followed he exhibited extensively in Seattle. His work was featured at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and he was shown regularly at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery, the Gordon Woodside Gallery, and the Foster White Gallery.

While often experimental in his approach and constantly exploring different visual themes and media, Meitzler was best known for his paintings of waterfalls and rocks depicted in a style that managed to wrangle abstract and expressionistic mark-making into moving representational imagery. Mentions of his paintings can be found in numerous texts, including The Artists of Puget Sound, The Pacific Northwest Landscape, and Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art.

In 1989, Meitzler moved to the Walla Walla Valley. Here, he maintained a small home studio with his partner, artist, collector, and master gardener, Ikune Sawada. After settling in Walla Walla, Meitzler continued to show his work occasionally, participating not only in local venues such as the Clyde and Mary Harris Gallery at WWU, the Blue Creek Gallery, and the Carnegie Art Center but also exhibiting at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA and at Bellingham’s Whatcom Museum of Art.

Although in his last years Meitzler exhibited only rarely, constantly moved by the urge to create he painted actively until just before he passed away in 2009, at the age of seventy-nine. The Combine Gallery’s exhibition Reflection/Refraction: The Art of Neil Meitzler will be the first showing and significant sale of his work since his retrospective exhibition Spectra, Stream, Strata, held by Whitman College’s Sheehan Gallery in 2010.