Sandra Meigs’ Room for Mystics

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Sandra Meigs, “Room for Mystics, No. 9,” 2016

acrylic on canvas, 76” x 76”

A hand-built model of a room at the Art Gallery of Ontario sits like a dollhouse on a paint-smudged table in Sandra Meigs’ studio in a non-descript low-rise in Victoria’s north-end industrial area. Peek over the walls and you’ll see Meigs’ concept: large eye-popping paintings, hinged one to the other, scattered through the space like so many A-frames at a holiday camp. High above, catapulting down the walls, are canvas banners painted with huge yellow spirals.

The installation, Room for Mystics, will show at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the fall as part of her 2015 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to Canadian art. Meigs, who received a Governor General’s Award in visual arts that same year, completed 15 paintings for the show last summer and plans to finish 15 more this summer, once she retires from teaching at the University of Victoria. Most are bright and bold, some dizzyingly so, yet their inspiration is calm.

“The paintings come from meditations that give entry to unlimited force, energy, love, being and presence,” says Meigs. “This allows a radical intervention into the practice of painting. The outcome of the intervention is exuberant visual energy coming forth through the work.” The first group of paintings, along with some maquettes, is on view until Feb. 11 at Winchester Galleries in Victoria. The preview’s title, fittingly, is En Trance.

While the Winchester show is more constrained – both in space and concept – than the installation planned for Toronto, there’s no mistaking the work’s quality. Meigs’ paintings vary in style yet are held together by their bright colours and flat matte surfaces. Some are sketchy, others diagrammatic. Some veer toward Op art, others more to Pop, while a few seem almost conceptual. The blending of styles and influences within her own aesthetic envelope has long been a hallmark of Meigs’ work. “I never wanted to stick to one method of depicting form,” she says. “But there’s a unity, to me, in the subject matter in all of these pictures. I find that very exciting.”

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Sandra Meigs, “Room for Mystics, No. 3,” 2016

acrylic on canvas,
72” x 58”

It’s hard to read critical writing about Meigs without tripping over a description of her work as “deceptively simple.” That observation springs not only from the formal clarity of her vision, but also this rich undercurrent of influences. Simplicity, as any expert will tell you, is not easy. It takes years of work to make something look effortless, a constant effort to pare down to what is essential without losing what is unique.

The work is so fresh that Meigs seems uncertain how to discuss it. But the desire to communicate the odd ethereality of metaphysical experience is clear. The paintings invite metaphors that expand outward to encompass satellites and solar systems, but also move into the lush darkness of the body, and more pertinently, the mind. “The work utters a call to pay attention, to wake up,” Meigs writes in her exhibition statement. “Each canvas permits an unfolding encounter. We can never really know the experiencer. We can only really know the experience. As such, the paintings are talismans to elevate the soul, to get the small egoic self out of the way, and to allow space for living in the moment.”

Meigs, who was born in Baltimore in 1953, and has lived in Canada since 1973, roots her work in personal experience. Her 2013 series, The Basement Panoramas, for instance, came in the aftermath of her husband’s death to cancer. They had been married less than a year. The basements depicted in four sprawling diagrammatic paintings are easily read as stand-ins for the dark hole we can crawl into as we come to terms with grief.

During this troubled time, Meigs immersed herself in meditation. “I came out of it feeling reborn, like a new person,” she says. In 2015, she completed All to All, a spunky show crammed with bright circular paintings. The show also included rotating cookie tins that housed noisemakers and clocks without faces that chimed on their own schedule. People loved the work, she says. “I was ecstatic about the feeling of joy and glee that it seemed to immerse people in.”

Early on, as Meigs thought about the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the idea of letting sound activate the paintings came to her. She reached out to Christopher Butterfield, who teaches music composition and theory at the University of Victoria. He asked her what she was hearing. She replied: “Metal, brass.” From there, their ideas developed in parallel but separate fashion. He suggested placing large speakers next to the paintings, each playing a different note, with the goal of creating a wall of sound. “The beauty of it is, as you walk around the gallery space, every step you take, the sound changes,” says Meigs. Another touch? Daily performances by a brass trio. “The players will come in and try to tune their instruments as they walk around the room.”

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Sandra Meigs, “Room for Mystics, No. 7,” 2016

acrylic on canvas, 80” x 90”

Meigs points to a painting, her seventh. It buzzes with energy. The background is citric yellow. Over top are curved red lines and a bolder horizontal spiral that suggest space and form. Meigs points to a small curved line – a smile, she says, one of the work’s scattered references to human presence. Then she points to another work. “This one was after a meditation where I saw this being appear before me,” she says. “She was wearing a flowing yellow-golden chiffon gown. She had these big red horns coming out of the side of her head. And then she smiled. So I call her the love goddess.” The painting, loose in the extreme, demonstrates Meigs’ mastery of the ad hoc line. When viewed digitally, it looks almost like a drawing doodled with markers. In reality, the lines are much richer and more varied. It’s the kind of work that only someone at the top of their game, with utter surety of vision, would have the courage – and skill – to pull off. But more than that, when all is said and done, the painting is much like life – impressionistic, ephemeral, shimmering – imperfect, yet beautiful in its own way. And then, suddenly, in a blink, it’s over.