Landry McMeans is a full time artist based in Austin, TX with a passion for color and the American West.
Landry creates limited edition stencil paintings with a sophisticated, muted, desert color palette. She brings to life a sunbleached dreamworld of iconic southwest landscapes and its flora and fauna with large scale, lifesize works. Her art is transportive and balances a warm, organic tone with crisp, clean lines, and a graphic pop aesthetic.
Nature, largely the desert, is my muse. I have an obsession with color relationships, and love the challenge of simplifying an image into its most essential and beautiful parts. I extract what's necessary, and play with color pallets. I enlarge and amplify what is normally small and overlooked to create an powerful, immersive, and serene experience.
Image Credit Matt Gaillet
The Process
Landry McMeans utilizes stenciling as her primary medium, drawing from a background in graphic design. Her process begins with the composition of images in Photoshop, meticulously crafted layer by layer, akin to the screen printing process. Each piece is a testament to her dedication to detail. Layers are translated to individual stencils on bristol paper, where each shape of the image is hand-cut. Color is a major facet of McMeans’ work, and each shade is hand mixed and applied for crisp, defined shapes. With some designs encompassing upwards of 14 stencil layers, her method underscores both complexity and precision.
Each “print” emerging from McMeans' studio is a limited edition, handmade original work of art, imbued with its own unique character. Embracing the temporal nature of her stencil prints, McMeans finds liberation in the ever-evolving process, viewing each subsequent print as an opportunity for artistic evolution. With a finite lifespan for stencils, she finds inspiration in the distinctive charm of the gradual degradation of each stencil, resulting in prints that resonate with captivating allure and enduring creativity.
I am drawn to the "muted psychedelia" of the desert, and I create visual records of desert landscapes and the flora and fauna that need to be remembered and protected.
— Landry McMeans
In addition to visual art, Landry is a songwriter and steel guitar player.
McMeans originally found inspiration for her work from almost a decade of summers touring throughout the southwest with musical outfits, The Lonesome Heroes, and Brooklyn, NY based band, Gangstagrass (Emmy nominated). Long desert drives from gig to gig on hot summer days is where she was first introduced to the "muted psychedelia" and dreamscapes of the Desert.
Image Credit Matt Gaillet
