Clayton Merrell: March 2024

Clayton Merrell grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, and Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela. He studied painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art, where he earned an MFA in 1995. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant for research and creative work in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1996-97. His work is exhibited widely, at venues including: the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC; Concept Art Gallery, Pittsburgh PA; the A+D Gallery, Chicago; the Westmoreland Museum of Art; and the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua NY. His work is in the collections of the American Embassy in Belmopan, Belize, the Smithsonian Museum, the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, the U.S. Department of the Interior, and numerous private and corporate collections. He was the 2005 Artist of the Year at The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and in 2016 was named Creator-of-the-Year by the Pittsburgh Technology Council. He has received awards and fellowships from MASS MoCA, the Heinz Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Skowhegan, Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Vermont Studio Center, ProArts, Artists Image Resource, and Center for the Arts in Society. During 2004-05 he was a fellow at the Roswell Artist-In-Residence Foundation in Roswell, New Mexico. In 2015, the Pittsburgh International Airport completed construction of a 69,000 square foot terrazzo floor based on his design. He is expanding on that design as part of the Terminal Modernization Project, now under construction. He is currently the Dorothy L. Stubnitz Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

My work is an attempt to create something like an honest contemporary landscape idiom. There is a dual desire within my paintings; the desire to make lushly beautiful landscape images that reach toward the solace, scope and perspective that the natural world can provide, and the desire to represent the destructive changes that we are rapidly unleashing on that world. I present viewers with simple vistas of natural harmony and the picturesque that are undermined by extreme atmospheric events, cataclysmic forces, and abrupt spatial ruptures. In the studio I am always looking for a peculiar balance – for images that can be simultaneously comforting and disquieting, familiar and disorienting, beautiful and bewildering.

I want to make a painting that conveys how beautiful our world is. I want to make a painting that conveys how broken our world is. I want them to be the same painting.

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Concept Art Gallery

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