Meryl Engler
Meryl Engler
Meryl Engler grew up in Huntington Beach, California playing lots of different sports, hanging out on the beach and drawing as much as possible. Meryl made a big transition to attend Syracuse University where she studied sculpture, printmaking, religious studies and history, and also competed on the women’s rowing team. Next she attended graduate school at University of Nebraska-Lincoln for studio art with an emphasis in printmaking. This is where she developed her love of colorful woodcut prints. Meryl has shown in Lincoln, Syracuse, Los Angeles, Houston, and internationally. For the past three years, Meryl coached rowing at Lake Oswego Community Rowing outside Portland Oregon. She is currently the Artist-in-Residence at Rubber City Prints in Akron, Ohio.
I am an artist using woodcut to create layered prints that evoke intimate, magical moments within the hidden landscapes of our environment. Woodcut is incredibly physical and energetic, but also requires a level of intimacy and care in carving each mark. The resulting work is subtle and bold, careful and rash, reflecting my own state of being as the artist.
Each one of my series of works chronicles a relationship, either with a person, place or specific time period of my life. I find that I remember things in landscapes. I remember playing in the ocean as a child, watching the light dance along the waves. I remember the piles of fabric and yarn surrounding my mother as she sat to sew blankets. In my mind the patterns from a quilt she makes becomes rolling fields or crashing waves. Looking through a chain link fence, I see the space beyond, either a future or a memory, or something even more than that. Lately I have been adding figures to my work, characters to interact within these places, and most recently, started a series of self portraits to chronicle my own growth into adulthood.