Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
Every day but Sunday, in a cedar-planked studio on Vianney High School’s campus, Brother Mel Meyer is laboring at a lifelong spiritual task. He’s a monk with a welder’s hands and easily St. Louis’ most prolific artist.
A few weeks before his 80th birthday, the soft-spoken Marianist jokes about sleeping in to celebrate. For 50 years, he has worked six days a week, 52 weeks of the year, producing frescoes, large-scale metal and paper sculptures, stained-glass windows, watercolors and icons rendered in stone, door hinges and railroad spikes.
He wakes at 5 a.m., exercises to relieve his neck and shoulders, reads the newspaper, then goes to church for an hour of Mass and meditation. He eats breakfast with the other monks living in the campus dormitory, changes clothes and works until 4 p.m., bringing the inanimate to life with his plasma cutter or swathes of bold, primary color.
“Well,” he concedes, “I don’t know if I’ll take the day off.”
Perched on a steel chair with spiraling tendrils in a space that evokes both gallery and chapel, Brother Mel is anxious to get back to the gritty production in his workshop. “Yeah,” he brushes aside the birthday fantasy, “I’ll be here working.”
This daily commitment is grounded in one made more than 60 years ago, his first summer out of high school. Driving home after a day of swimming, Mel’s friend asked him what he would do with his life. Mel was working for his father’s pump company and wasn’t sure about college. His friend said he wanted to be a priest.
“Look—if you become a priest, I’m going with you,” Mel said.
They visited the rectory the following day. Mel filed papers to begin the formation process, but his friend had second thoughts.
“He never did join,” Mel says. “He got married and had 16 children.”
Brother Mel’s artistic life began later at the University of Notre Dame, where he studied with sculptor Ivan Mestrovic and painter Jean Charlot, a former assistant to Diego Rivera.
In the midst of his graduate work, he traveled to the Bordeaux region of France to conduct research for the design of a chapel at Chaminade College Preparatory School in St. Louis. In one year, he logged 1,400 miles on his white 1957 Lambretta scooter, sleeping in barns, climbing cathedral ladders to photograph the stained glass and sketching anything that inspired him, including the face of St. John Vianney, whose body lay uncorrupted in the Sanctuaire d’Ars, northwest of Lyon.
“That was my education,” Mel says with a lift in his otherwise raspy voice.
Considering one of his watercolor houses on the gallery wall or the brushed-metal sculptures standing sentinel in the yard, a visitor might not find religious content in the Modernist forms. For Brother Mel, the creative act itself is a “spiritual reading.”
“People come in and ask, ‘Do you have any religious work?’ and I say, ‘Yeah. Everything is religious.’”
Anne Brown, owner of The Arts Company in Nashville, believes that Old World craftsmanship and “a 20th-century longing to be inventive” make Brother Mel unlike any other artist she has seen. In June, Brown’s gallery hosted a retrospective, charting Meyer’s journey from his graduate study through various eras, including his “polka- dot” and “sheer” periods. This tribute was followed by an exhibition at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild (which runs through October 11). From October 10 through November 21, The Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles dedicates all of Gallery III to his work.
Whether it’s a simple bowl made from welded silverware or the Neon Chapel in Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Brother Mel’s artwork accomplishes its only goal: “to bring beauty to space to lift up spirit.”
The St. Louis Artists’ Guild is located at 2 Oak Knoll in Clayton (314-727-6266); find The Foundry Art Centre at 520 N. Main (636-255-0270, foundryartcentre.org) and the Marianist Galleries at 1265 Maryhurst Drive in Kirkwood (314-965-0877). For more information on Brother Mel Meyer, go to melsmart.com.
