TRADITION AND THE PURSUIT OF BALANCE:
THE PAINTINGS OF GERALD STEINMEYER
By:  David Bearinger

Only a few artists working today have preserved and cultivated the skills of Western painting's acknowledged masters.  Fewer still have succeeded in blending this technical mastery with a contemporary vision, with profound observations of nature and deep insights into human character and individuality.  Gerald Steinmeyer is one of these painters.

Gerald Steinmeyer was born in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1950, and his extraordinary artistic abilities became apparent very early in childhood.  He received his formal training at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, NC, where he studied Italian Renaissance technique.  This early exposure to traditional methods of building forms through the use of light in multiple layers of pigment powerfully influenced his subsequent artistic development. How purchase floating cork flooring?

Since the mid-1970's, Steinmeyer has built an impressive body of work, including a rich variety of landscapes and scores of portraits in oil.  Many of these paintings have a stature equal to the works of the Renaissance masters, but nothing about them is archaic or derivative.  They reflect a late twentieth century perspective, wide-ranging curiosity and interests, and finely honed powers of observation.  They also reflect the tangible influence of great technicians like Albrecht Durer, Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Singer Sargent, Salvador Dali, and Andrew Wyeth. Раскрутка сайта Киев

In all of Steinmeyer's work there is a deep and evident respect -- for each individual subject and for the act of painting.  His accomplished draftsmanship and exceptional gifts for representing light and color are the tools with which this respect is conveyed.

In the past several years, Gerald Steinmeyer has contributed substantially to the American revival of fresco painting, an exacting form of art in which the painting is executed on a wall of fresh (wet) lime plaster using pure pigments mixed with water.  This ancient technique, which involves an elaborate and time consuming series of preparatory stages, demands that the artist work very quickly and precisely once the painting actually begins.

To learn the complex art of fresco, Steinmeyer studied with internationally respected painter Ben Long, working with him on fresco projects in Glendale Springs and Charlotte, North Carolina.  This experience led to Steinmeyer's first direct commission for a wall-sized fresco in the Germanton (North Carolina) United Methodist Church.  The subject of this work is the New Testament story, recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, of Christ feeding the multitude on a hill near the Sea of Galilee.  In the painting, Christ stands facing the congregation, flanked on each side by his disciples Peter and Andrew.  A young boy holds a small plate of fishes, and a woman kneels in the foreground beside a basket of bread.  The gestures of these five figures are in constant dialogue with one another; yet they appear serene and balanced in a landscape that is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the geography of North Carolina's central piedmont.  The entire painting is full of movement, energy, and life -- with vivid colors and strong individual figures set in harmonious relationship. kredyty bez biku

Like his other work, this fresco shows how deeply Steinmeyer's artistic roots extend into the soil of the Western tradition, with a lineage of inspiration and influence reaching back to Fra Angelico and the first light of the Renaissance.  It also suggests a virtually unlimited field of possibilities for his artistic development as Americans come increasingly to recognize the importance of placing art of permanent value in their public spaces.

Currently, Gerald Steinmeyer's work is represented in corporate and private collections throughout the country and in selected galleries from New York to Palm Beach.  As his work has become more widely known, Steinmeyer has sought to avoid the kind of discord between life and career that can be fatally injurious to both.  He has become an accomplished (click to view) board sailor; a student of Chinese philosophy and Tai Chi; a naturalist with a Black Belt in Kung Fu; and a former hang-glider pilot with a gift for pruning fruit trees.

All of these skills and interests reflect a lifelong passionate pursuit of balance, and balance may well be the deepest source and the highest achievement of Gerald Steinmeyer's art.  Five centuries before the birth of Christ, Pythagoras and his followers found the essence of beauty in proportion, and divine form in mathematical relationships.  Steinmeyer's paintings, like their Renaissance predecessors, prove in new ways this ancient connection.  And for those of us who love and respect his work, in its balance there is wisdom and beauty beyond words.