Notes

The night sky is a rare theme in John Meyer’s landscape painting. One other example, Them and Us (2009), is illustrated in colour on page 157 of the catalogue for his Retrospective (1972 - 2012).¹

In Odysseus, Meyer weaves a narrative of adventure into the drama of the moonless southern sky. Illuminated by the Magellanic clouds, which are distant galaxies beyond the Milky Way, a satellite shoots across the celestial plane, whilst an ancient baobab perches stoically on a rocky outcropping.

Titled after the character of Homer’s Odyssey, Meyer’s painting conjures a journey to the outer limits of the human imagination. Artists and poets have constantly returned to this epic tome with John Keats writing;

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;”²

A recurring characteristic in Meyer’s work is this subtle sense of human presence. Meyer has noted that: “It is through being human that we have any sense of the landscape. We think we impose ourselves, but we are just short-term sojourners here. We think we alter the landscape to suit ourselves, but in many ways it is the other way around; the landscape tells us what we can do to it. The enormity of landscape is so vast that we have very little influence on it.”³   

In this sweeping panorama, Meyer turns his attention away from the landscape to the new frontier of space, and poses an existential question about future voyages and mankind’s place in the universe.

1 John Meyer. (2013) A Retrospective 1972 - 2012. Kenilworth: Minx Publishing.

2 John Keats in Daniel J Boorstin. (1992) The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. New York: Random House.

3 John Meyer. (2013) My Country: The Collection. Cape Town, Everard Read.