Charlie J. Meyers
Revival at Sunset

28 x 30 inches
Oil on Belgian linen
2023

“Revival at Sunset” is my interoception, the site at which my neurobiology, somatic state, and facture coincide as one inner horizon. This painting, like each painting in my new body of work, is the last four years in extension.

Somatic meditation punctuates my days, and music plays on continuous repeat. I live and paint in a downregulated physiological state. In this state, felt geometries emerge with each painted mark. I work in a deep absorption in which thinking and moving are simultaneous. Within this absorption, my spatial tracking, neural pressure, and motor praxis are one gesture in every stroke.

A 10-millimeter cavernoma lies in my septum pellucidum, at the brain’s deep midline axis, which organizes spatial orientation, autonomic equilibrium, and baseline perception of time. The cavernoma is an enlarged, thin-walled cluster of my brain’s own blood vessels, and it oozes blood into my surrounding tissue. Its presence is the work, and I am its presence. The cavernoma bleeds through the last four years of painting.

A yellow mass burns just above the center of “Revival at Sunset,” cradled in a fluorescent green arc. Below the yellow mass, a vertical axis descends to the lower edge, and every plane in the composition branches from that axis or bends back toward it. In several places, the paint runs straight down the surface. The painting instantiates the somatosensory architecture of a gravitational pull toward the midline, the same axis on which my cavernoma lies.

Conceived under both thought and extension, painting is a single act of a unified sensorium.

View additional abstract paintings by Charlie J. Meyers