John Meyer is considered one of South Africa’s foremost realist painters. Meyer completed his studies at the Johannesburg Technical College’s School of Art before taking up employment within the advertising industry and later working as an illustrator in London. In the 1970s, Meyer returned to South Africa and made the decision to pursue a career in art. He has been exhibiting with Everard Read gallery since 1975. 

Meyer’s oeuvre predominantly comprises landscapes, genre paintings and portraits. Some of his most significant series of works include Mandela, A Life’s Journey; Elizabeth, A Sovereign’s Journey and Lost in the Dust, a body of depicting scenes relating to the Anglo Boer War. While the artist is committed to creating representational works, the scenes he depicts are imagined as opposed to being recordings of specific scenes and events. With his almost photo-realistic imagery, Meyer brings to the fore the complexities of visual perception, interpretation, and the subjectivity of the viewer.

Meyer is particularly celebrated for his unique ability to capture the intangible essence of the South African landscape within his paintings. Meyer developed his narrative genre, exploring the complex currents of human relationships, into a series of separate but related views of the same scene. These ‘Sequential Narratives’ typically explore the nature of intimacy between men and women. The series reflects his interest in compositional interaction rather than conventional realism  and displays his traditional visual hallmark – a tight theatrical control of the painted surface. Meyer is a master of staging, plot and lighting and there is a quality to the paintwork that reinforces the themes of emotional ambiguity between the protagonists in the paintings.

Building on this process, in recent years Meyer has concentrated on several series, which offer his own take on landscapes, celebrated lives and historic events. He completed a body of fifteen works set during the Anglo Boer War, titled Lost in the Dust. The exhibition offered an intimate and compelling look at how war affects the lives of those swept up in it. The collection combined Meyer’s talents for landscape and narrative in a unique body of works. Lost in the Dust was followed by a collection of sixteen works on the life of Nelson Mandela. Being such a celebrated life, Meyer avoided the obvious, and showed us what might have happened behind the scenes, from his childhood and as a young man, before he became the icon we all came to know. With the collaboration of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the private collector who owns the entire series, the exhibition opened in Johannesburg and Cape Town before travelling to the Melbourne Museum in Australia and Eden Park, Auckland, New Zealand. In a similar vein, Meyer completed a collection of eleven paintings on the remarkable life of Queen Elizabeth II. It explored her life from child to sovereign and beyond, focusing on her love of country, family, corgis and horses, as well as her dedication to her duty.  In 2019 Meyer completed a series of fifteen large works titled Migrations, exploring the journeys of the various migrating peoples and immigrants that created the South African nation. 2022 saw the launch of a series of eighteen large paintings titled The Planet Earth Collection, exhibited at Masterpiece in London. The works highlighted some of the most beautiful places on earth currently under threat from climate change. With these, it was Meyer’s intention to add his voice to the looming crisis before it is too late. 

Meyer has exhibited extensively both across South Africa and abroad. His work is held in a number of important collections including Anglo American, Johannesburg; ExxonMobil, Dallas; the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Cape Town; and the Standard Bank collection, Johannesburg.