Loss and a family project infuse new life into artist’s work
A year after her father died from a ruptured brain tumor, Karlin Meehan began creating abstract gold paintings.
She took a large canvas, splattered it with acrylic, oil, house and spray paint and then added a labyrinth of lines and layers that unfolded slowly to reveal bits and pieces both recognizable and mysterious.
“I had my art rescue me,” said Meehan, a Laguna Beach resident.
Meehan was explaining her deeply personal approach to the paintings she creates on the top floor in the W.H. Spurgeon Building, a 105-year-old, four-story, cream-colored brick structure in downtown Santa Ana that was the city’s first skyscraper.
Her late father, affectionately called “Big Jay” Meehan, was part owner of the structure, which has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979, and he’d often bring his tight-knit Irish-Mexican family of five sons and one daughter to the building when doing business in Santa Ana.
The Spurgeon Building, on Fourth and Sycamore streets, became a haven for artists, who set up studios and galleries in the warren of lofts that filled the place, but business waned after the 9/11 attacks, and the structure remained empty for 10 years.
At age 63, days before Thanksgiving 2015, Big Jay died unexpectedly, and the Newport Beach family found it too difficult to return to the corner building with the memories.
That changed a little over a year ago, when Meehan and her brother Pierce, a sculptor, decided to reinvigorate the building with their artistry.
“We owe this to our family,” Meehan said, as she stood in a studio space full of brushes, canvases and spray cans. “We want to honor this space and there’s a new energy in here.”
There’s a new energy in her paintings too.
Meehan’s large-scale paintings, suffused with metallic hues, are layered and textured, and they are intended to make a viewer come up close to the canvas. It’s a new direction for an artist who had painted colorful florals in the past but found the subject to be a less-than-honest expression of her spirit.
“I was in a rut making pieces but wasn’t happy with them, and I felt like a phony,” Meehan says. “This work is a reaction from loss and feeling defeated. I needed to put a celebratory spin on it.”
The result is her new “Metallic Series,” a collection of 20 pieces that Meehan will showcase during an artist reception March 4 at Georgia Grogg’s G Galerie in Newport Beach’s Cannery Village. The exhibition is slated to run for about two months.
“If you’ve seen her work, you can clearly see the energy and spontaneity that comes from this young artist,” says Grogg, who has owned the gallery for 10 years.
“It has been my goal to feature under-represented, gifted artists,” Grogg said. “Karlin is certainly one of those. These underexposed artists rarely get one-man shows. Her artwork reflects her personality as well, on-the-fly and confident.”
Meehan, who graduated from Newport Harbor High and earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, remains enthralled by the spontaneous evolution of each piece.
While working on three to four paintings at a time, Meehan might mix white chalk with a little gold paint and then spray paint layers while also leaving a bit of the raw canvas untouched. She also has tried her hand at using tools she hadn’t used before, like Squeegees and different painting brushes for a variety of brush strokes.
She and Pierce — whose “Surf Panel” series has been commissioned by private clients including the Pete Carroll family and are spotlighted at A’maree’s boutique in Newport Beach, among other businesses — are slowly welcoming more artists to the Spurgeon Building.
The building is a work in progress and is not set up to accommodate Meehan’s exhibit.
During the new journey, Meehan says she has learned more about her father.
Strangers told her that her father had invited them over for Thanksgiving dinner when they had nowhere to go, that her mother opened the home and treated them like family.
Another said her father helped the person apply for food stamps.
This helps explain why more than 1,000 people attended a memory service in his honor at a Newport Beach winery, causing the Newport Beach Fire Department to close it down, Meehan said.
“My dad was such a force and was this larger-than-life person who gave people time,” Meehan said.
And then it happens. A mention of him leads seemlessly into a discussion of her art, so intertwined are they.
“You have to push through it and I do it with my art,” Meehan said. “I’ll work on a series, have to let it rest and then look at it with fresh eyes. And then, like anything, you have to let it go.”
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IF YOU GO
What: Karlin Meehan’s “Metallic Series” artist reception
When: 6 to 9 p.m. March 4; exhibit will remain for several weeks
Where: G Galerie, 504 30th St., Newport Beach
Cost: Admission is free
Information: (949) 981-6432 or email georgia@tomgrogg.com
Twitter: @KathleenLuppi
