Abbott Meader

Biography

Abbott Meader is an American painter, filmmaker and retired Professor of art. Born In the Brooklyn area of New York City, his roots and many generations of ancestors are to be found in the northern, rural state of Maine, where he and his wife Nancy have lived since the 1960s. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College, and while in graduate school at the University of Colorado he became a friend of noted filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who encouraged him to explore film as well as painting and drawing. Meader’s early films reveal the influence of Brakhage, while clearly moving toward a distinctive personal vision. His work has been shown frequently in film festivals – in Brussels, Rome, Rapallo, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Boston, and at many schools and colleges over the years. From the early 1960s into the 1990s he produced a large body of personal film work while continuing to paint, teach, and help raise a family along with his wife Nancy, who had become a noted potter. Around the year 2000 it seemed to him that 16 mm was being essentially eliminated as he saw film stocks and labs disappear and costs go up substantially, and he reached an impasse. Always active as a painter as well as a filmmaker, the tangible “thingness” of film, with its individual frame as an actual surface to work on by hand, to be carefully picked up and held to the light, then physically cut and spliced — these physical characteristics had been essential. He therefore reluctantly decided to leave the world of personal film making and return primarily to painting. He nevertheless continued to collaborate with other filmmakers on a variety of projects as he had done over many years. His existing body of 16mm film work numbers well over fifty titles, and now, with the help of Bruce Williams, his friend and fellow filmmaker, Meader’s films are getting new life in a pristine digital form that makes them accessible to an expanded audience.