Sandra Meigs: Beasts, Clocks, and Popeye

For more than four decades, Sandra Meigs has sustained a painting practice defined by curiosity, attentiveness, and a profound commitment to looking. Through three interconnected bodies of work - Beasts, Clocks, and Popeye - she reflects on what it means to dedicate a life to painting, returning to subjects that have occupied her.

Though distinct, these three motifs are united by a meditation on time. Time measured and counted, time unnoticed, time suspended, and time revisited. Drawing on vintage clocks, toy figurines from the 1930-50’s, invented creatures, and her beloved muse Popeye, Sandra creates works that exist outside standard chronology. Rendered with extraordinary clarity, the paintings subjects appear suspended in a state of quiet attention, caught between movement and rest, presence and disappearance. These images seem to make aware the impermanence of memories, relationships, and perceptions; they emerge, linger, dissolve, and return again in altered forms.

The Clocks, with their emphatic bodies, faces, and hands, become more than instruments for measuring hours. They evoke the paradoxes of time itself: its unforgiving forward motion and its capacity to stretch, contract, and disappear within lived experience. Familiar and intimate, the Clocks suggest both the structure of daily life and the passage of years.