Check Out Meredith Nemirov’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Meredith Nemirov.

Hi Meredith, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
I was born and raised in New York City. It was an upbringing filled with culture including frequent visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, and others. Also weekly classical music concerts at the Juilliard School, Lincoln Center, and other venues around the city. Later as a teenager, I went to the free concerts in Central Park where I heard the beginnings of reggae music, Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and a lot of jazz at clubs downtown. I was fortunate to have parents who were commercial artists to make a living but also painted and sculpted at home during their time off. They were very supportive of my desire to paint and draw all the time studying figure drawing starting at age 14 at The Art Student’s League of NYC (ASL) and then my choice to attend Parson’s School of Design where I received a BFA in illustration. I worked as a freelance illustrator in NYC for eleven years after graduation.

In 1988, my husband, Jorge Anchondo, and I left the city and headed to California, where he was born and raised, but due to a number of serendipitous events, we ended up moving to the small mountain town of Ridgway, Colorado. There was a population of only 350 people in the town back then and it was quite an adjustment after living in New York City my entire life. The thing that kept me there, trying to adjust to life in a small town with little or no access to an art community, was the generous spirit of the people, the incredible beauty of the natural environment, and the safe lifestyle.

That first year we opened the Ridgway Gallery, which specialized in antique prints, maps, and books about the exploration of the American West. We learned so much about that history, early printmaking processes, and the artists that went west to depict the land and movement we call Manifest Destiny. Then we bought our first house, our son was born and we were committed. Now, thirty-four years later, I feel fortunate to have lived this second part of my life in such a different environment.

When we closed the gallery in 1999, our son was older and we both wanted to get back to our own artistic life and studio practice. To jumpstart that we both took a workshop at the Anderson Ranch Center for the Arts and that changed our lives. Since then we have been working and exhibiting work in the SW region of the US. I would be remiss not to mention how much my teaching career has contributed to my life as an artist. When the Ah Haa School for the Arts opened in Telluride in 1992, Jorge and I started teaching classes. He taught analog darkroom classes and I taught watercolor and drawing. I continued to teach there for the next thirty years along with classes at other art centers in CO and at my studio in Ridgway. Figure drawing was my first love and we kept a class going in so many different spaces around this small rural town. Then a fantastic ten years of teaching Plein air landscape painting each autumn at The Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM. I am mostly retired from teaching by continuing to teach a workshop once a year in April at La Serrania in Mallorca, Spain. This will be our sixth year returning to that beautiful Mediterranean Island.

In my studio, I continue to paint concentrating on a series of works that are always inspired by the natural environment in which I live and walk every day.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has been a wonderful road though not without its challenges. The biggest challenge was recreating myself and my art career after my child was a bit older and we closed our gallery. I live almost a six-hour drive from any major city and I missed the stimulation of going to museums and a community of full-time professional artists. This was also before the internet existed. When I took my first drawing class at the Anderson Ranch the artist teaching the class suggested that I subscribe to Modern Painters Magazine and look up shows of contemporary art and spend the money to buy the catalogs from the shows since I wasn’t flying to see them.

That made all the difference to my studio practice. I am extremely grateful to the arts organizations and groups who have been so supportive with vital financial and moral support and the opportunity to exhibit my work. The three local organizations are Telluride Arts (formally Telluride Council for the Arts and Humanities), the Ah Haa School for the Arts, and Weehawken Creative Arts. I had to do so many things to keep going, part of the challenge of living in a rural area, but it has been so intense and gratifying. I could not have done it without the support of my family. They have been with me all the way!

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
There have been several important things that have influenced my work and the direction it has taken. First was moving from the city where I was a figurative painter to an environment where people were not the top priority and landscape was the overwhelming presence in my life, in an observational aspect, and in all other parts of my life. This switch to being a perceptive artist portraying my immediate surroundings was huge. I was still looking for my figure in the landscape and that became the aspen tree.

The years in our gallery looking at old atlases and historic topo maps was the thing that took my work into a more abstract depiction of the tree. The way cartographers created patterns and symbols that represented the geology and different aspects of the land worked their way into my paintings in the form of topographical lines and pattern-making.

Recently I have taken this one step further by actually using the old maps as the paper upon with I paint the trees and other parts of the landscape mainly rivers. People who see my work have commented that it is very unique because of this different interpretation of the landscape.

I am most proud of my recent work including a collaboration I did with the poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer for an exhibition titled Piplantri for the New Year’s Eve fundraising gala at the Ah Haa School for the Arts in Telluride in 2019. I painted 111 small 5″ x 7″ paintings of the aspen tree and she wrote 111 poems all on recycled paper. We donated 50% of sales to the Ah Haa School for its educational programming the other 50% went to the Merwin Conservancy. Each person got to choose a painting with a poem both inserted into a folder and purchased for $111. Please look up Piplantri and the Merwin Conservancy to read more about them. I have included an installation shot for you to see how it looked.

My Rivers Feed the Trees series which was started in November of 2020 during our Covid lockdown has been one of the more gratifying series of works on paper of my career as an artist. I painted aspen trees on old geological topographical maps of Colorado but I also painted the color blue into the topography of the land as an imaginative visual gesture to re-water the land to address the extreme droughts we have been having throughout the western US.

This has continued as an ongoing Exploration of Topography, Rivers, and the color Blue. The response to this series of works has been incredible with articles appearing in Orion Magazine and an online talk through MAHB (Millenium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere) at Stanford University. I have also sold many of the original works through my three galleries that have shown such enthusiastic support: Mixx Atelier in Telluride, Michael Warren Contemporary in the Santa Fe Arts District in Denver, and the Oh Be Joyful Gallery in Crested Butte. My work has been represented in these three galleries for many years and I appreciate them so much.

So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
In recent years and particularly due to the years of Covid I have been a bit isolated. But this has opened a whole new world of online exhibitions of which I have been a part. I particularly appreciate the Instagram site #whatsnextforearth and their online exhibition based on the online Think Resiliency Course focusing on resilience and the environment.

By collaborating with this group by submitting my work to their online exhibitions the focus of my work has changed with more of an interest in bringing attention to the climate crisis we are facing today. I would greatly appreciate any interest in using my work in a way to support these issues, whether including my work online, as part of a group in-person exhibition, or in a publication.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://meredithnemirov.com
• Instagram: Instagram.com/meredith.nemirov
• Facebook: Facebook.com/MeredithNemirov
• Other: https://michaelwarrencontemporary.com