There. Everywhere
Live Painting with Meredith in the gallery
Saturday, Feb 18th 1-4pm
Saturday, March 4th 1-4pm
Come see the show and watch Meredith create a painting live in the gallery. We will have wine and treats available for visitors!
The Compound Gallery is pleased to launch our 2023 art season with a solo show by Meredith Steele. Steele’s landscape paintings capture hidden moments found throughout the Bay Area.
The inspiration for this collection of paintings is not complicated. I see ideas for paintings during walks with my dog around my Oakland neighborhood, quick runs to the grocery store, or while waiting in my car at a traffic light. During these mundane activities, I catch the glimpse of a shape, then a relationship of shapes, and the way sunlight falls and casts layers of shadows across them. The Bay Area is a special place to be a painter. I regularly examine subtle textures and muted hues in the surrounding hillsides as well as value patterns in facades of convenience stores. I see ideas for paintings here, there, and everywhere.
Once I am working on a painting, I become interested in the microcosm of the work, allowing little bits of color to pop through as I apply thin layers of acrylic onto the surface. I encourage the viewer to get up close to the paintings and look for high intensity hues that peek through in my attempts to bring a robust, possibly unpredictable, quality to the everyday subjects.
I am indebted to the rich history of Bay Area painting. Although I studied art in the south, I have always been inspired by the reverence for light and hints of inventive color that other great Bay Area painters have expertly employed. While refining my process over the years, these approaches have edged their way into my own vocabulary of painting.
Meredith grew up in North Carolina and relocated to Oakland in 2009. She is an artist and educator with 20 years of teaching experience. She left teaching in 2020 to focus on her painting full time. Her subject matter is her daily life, and she creates paintings in her home studio from photographs she takes around the Bay Area.
Meredith has a Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree from Savannah College of Art and Design and Masters of Fine Arts Degree from Winthrop University. She lives in the Glenview neighborhood of Oakland with her husband, daughter, and silly pup Ferris.
