Recorded at the Art Papers Fire Ecology Symposium, Atlanta

Atlanta artist Michi Meko joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews during Art Papers' symposium weekend for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from southern port cities and landscape painting to pandemic solitude, mental health, and the strange spiritual work of making art.

Meko discusses his exhibition So Black and So Blue, a body of work developed between New Orleans and Savannah that reflects on color, history, and the charged atmosphere of southern coastal landscapes. Working with shimmering surfaces, deep blues, blacks, and gilded frames, the paintings operate between abstraction and landscape. They draw viewers into spaces that feel both cosmic and terrestrial, somewhere between daybreak and nightfall. The works are designed to be experienced in person, where layers of marks, reflective materials, and shifting color create movement and depth impossible to capture in photographs.

The conversation expands into the tension between hard-edge abstraction and expressive mark-making. Meko describes his earlier work using nautical signal flags as coded language about survival and buoyancy in America, while also poking at the seriousness of modernist abstraction. From there, the group debates the emotional power of painting, touching on artists like Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly, asking what makes a work spiritually or emotionally resonant and why some paintings leave viewers cold.

A major turning point in Meko's practice came during the COVID-19 shutdown. When Atlanta closed down, he packed his car with camping gear and disappeared into the mountains, spending long stretches alone hiking, fishing, and writing. The period became a personal reckoning. He stopped painting entirely, turned inward, and began confronting anxieties and habits that had previously gone unexamined. Through solitude and outdoor wandering, he reframed landscape not as scenery but as a metaphor for the inner terrain of the mind.

When Meko eventually returned to the studio, that experience reshaped his work. The paintings that emerged began to reflect internal states rather than external views. Horizons divide mind and body. Shimmering skies become metaphors for thought and anxiety. Dense fields of mark-making hold viewers inside the work, drawing them in and out of the image in a restless visual rhythm.

Throughout the conversation, Meko reflects on the strange transformation that can occur through isolation, describing the experience of leaving society and returning "a little feral, a little monk-like," carrying new perspectives about art, masculinity, therapy, and the ways people search for healing.

What emerges is a portrait of an artist navigating between wilderness and studio, darkness and wonder, abstraction and landscape. For Meko, painting becomes both exploration and survival, a way of mapping the landscapes inside ourselves.

Name Drop List (Bad at Sports style)

Michi Meko - https://www.michimeko.com
Art Papers - https://www.artpapers.org/
Duncan MacKenzie - https://kurasmackenzie.com/
Brian Andrews - https://www.brianandrews.org/
Louis Armstrong - https://www.louisarmstronghouse.org
Mark Rothko - https://www.markrothko.org
Rothko Chapel - https://www.rothkochapel.org
Ellsworth Kelly - https://ellsworthkelly.org
Bob Ross - https://www.bobross.com
J. M. W. Turner - https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jmw-turner-558
Thomas Cole - https://thomascole.org
The Goat Farm Arts Center - https://goatfarmartscenter.com
New Orleans
Savannah
Gulf of Mexico