Inspiration Blooms
A Meditation on the Resilience of Beauty
Words Janine Stankus | Photos Baptiste Despois
While bold and expressive, Revi Meicler’s works invite quiet contemplation: beckoning viewers to seek the familiar and surrender to the imagined. Blending multidimensional natural elements, and often unnatural colors, these rich, unraveling tapestries celebrate both the immutability and impermanence of life.
For Revi, art has been a lifelong practice. As someone who has moved around from a young age, it was her way of communicating with new groups of people. “ When you’re moving from culture to culture and learning languages, there is a blank slate there that you have to fill,” she explains. “And the way I filled it is the way I approach my artwork…you begin by picking out the things that you know and building from there. I think that’s why I’ve always been attracted to very layered work.”
She manifests these layers in her own work by using multiple mediums—watercolor, pencils, acrylic, oils, homemade papers—and a distinct way of weaving shapes and textures in and through each other. Her current series reflects a long evolution, from collaging around an ever-present figure to foregrounding background elements to develop textures. She credits working with local printmakers at Flatbed Press, a local art gallery that hosts printmaking classes, as a turning point in her practice.
“The botanical elements are inspirational in the sense that they’re resilient. No matter what happens, they seem to reemerge. Sometimes they disappear completely, but then the landscape will reinvent itself.” -Revi Meicler
When she printed her first set of monotypes, she was enchanted by the ‘mistakes,’ the shadows and ghosting that resulted. “My work started breaking up,” she recalls. “ I began noticing that the thing that remained was an energy—which seemed to be an innate energy that I carried forward in all the work that I did.”
Colorful abstraction also flourishes in Revi’s art which are a reflection of her daily photography walks. She embarks on these walks with one goal in mind: to notice something beautiful such as a drop of dew on a leaf, a bloom brought forth by long-awaited rain, a beam of sunshine lighting a grassy plain.
Revi uses bright colors over natural tones to reveal her reverence for their “magnificent, effervescent, magical existence.” The botanical elements are inspirational because of their resilience. “No matter what happens, they seem to reemerge,” she muses. “Sometimes they disappear completely, but then the landscape will reinvent itself.”
It’s this thread of change that winds through Revi’s work and inspires her artmaking ethos. She believes that when change evokes fear or discomfort, the fear is born of seeing change as only negative. Revi strives to interrupt that fear by seeking out and sharing the beauty she discovers. “Even in times of great strife, there is something beautiful going on. There’s somebody doing something great,” she implores. In fact, Revi believes that’s why artists exist…“to try to inspire in some way. Because sometimes…we can get so entrenched in that very survivalist mentality. Just be quiet for a while and draw something, appreciate somebody’s music, or something that somebody wrote.”
It’s those small pauses of appreciation that we find awe in the world’s capacity to keep creating and persist. It’s that embodiment of wonder and always-flowing energy that makes Revi’s work—and the viewer by proxy—feel truly vital.
The things we carry
If you search Revi’s canvases, you’ll often find a swath resembling netting—something Revi says she uses to symbolize the information that we carry with us and informs us in different ways. “Sometimes it’s genetic, or something that’s been passed on and helps us navigate,” she says. But these elements can also represent information that turns more rigid, “and basically become like fences that hold us back.”
Contact:
revimeicler.com
@revi_meicler
