Charles Miesmer

After setting aside a successful career in advertising in 2006, Charles Miesmer committed to his abstract painting practice full time. Initially inspired by the serene beachscapes of Nantucket, Miesmer’s early work explores this abstracted beachscape, softly delineating between sea and sky.

Later, Mieismer became inspired when his young daughter in which she spilled paint over the pages of a textbook. Miesmer began incorporating this effect into his practice, ‘in which individual pages from books have been painted, stained, sanded, bleached and transformed well past the intent of their original publisher and then arranged in either grid-like or random patterns on canvas, creating a surface of shifting and atmospheric fields of color.’ (ARC Fine Art)

More recently, Miesmer has focused increasingly on the power of language and the impact of words. In these more recent paintings, the artist repeats phrases or words across the canvas, in varying directions creating a different sort of color field either with differently hued texts or with strips of paper. These text paintings not only play against our expectations but force the repeated words and phrases beyond their meaning towards a something hypnotic.