If she keeps painting and creating, Meghan Spiro will find a comfort zone. She compares her work to keeping a journal.
Spiro wears three things on her sleeve: creativity, Cherokee ancestry and survival of domestic violence.
“I found myself ill-equipped to handle my PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], my addictions and my self-loathing,” she wrote for a solo show at the Beacon Artist Union gallery in 2019 that showcased 23 self-portraits and poems.
In one piece, “Broken Rib,” Spiro cowers and throws up her hands to ward off a blow. Completing that project helped her “transmute my suffering into wisdom and my loathing into love,” she says.
The show’s photo-based mixed media incorporated paint, resin, collage, gilding, digital compositing and photo transfers on marble. Seven marble works are on display at the Ascend Center + Collective on Main Street in Cold Spring.
Also in 2019, Hudson Beach Glass presented Spiro’s solo show, Bella Monnezza (Italian for “beautiful garbage”), a series of photos inspired by the contents of her composting bin.
Most of these still-life studies, set against a dark background, have a focal point, like a slice of lime, portions of an onion or a black-specked cross-section of dragon fruit. The rest of the frame is typically arranged with organics (e.g., okra slices) and botanicals (flowers, twigs and thyme).
The Atlanta native became a shutterbug in high school, learning the ropes in a darkroom and calculating that film and photography were the most lucrative pursuits for an artist. After earning a degree in California, Spiro worked in New York City for the Food Network but lived in the Hudson Valley because she’s a hiker and rock climber.
“People thought I was crazy when I also moved my work upstate” just before the 2008 recession, she says. A stint as a videographer at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck kickstarted her spiritual journey.
Today, Spiro is a commercial photographer specializing in lifestyle branding for the food and beverage industry. Clients include the Elixxr Cafe, Kitchen & Coffee, Beacon Bread Co. and Dennings Point Distillery in Beacon, and Reservoir and the Bird & Bottle Inn in Philipstown.
In 2011, she moved from Kingston to Beacon and lives in an airy loft with just enough furniture and plenty of room to paint, hang her work and assemble lighting rigs for shoots.
After her two solo shows in 2019, Spiro turned to oil, selling the first painting she completed and cultivating collectors. She favors small and medium-sized canvases and uses a thin cardboard tube to brace her right hand as she sits in a padded blue chair grooving to tunes.
This year, Spiro participated in the Back to School group show at the KuBe Center in the former Beacon High School. Exhibited in the one-time sex education room, her “food porn” series Arouse + Devour consisted of nine photos printed on metal, some of which have been pulled from Instagram for being too salacious.
Though Spiro aspires to a solo show for her paintings, it takes a while to complete each piece, partly because of her day job and a tween daughter. And, the subject matter can be emotionally challenging. One somber work, “The Baptism,” is a meditation on suicide.
In “Bloodline,” which references a miscarriage, red streaks drip down her face. Hands can be difficult to depict in oil, but here, Spiro skillfully renders the rippled puddles of skin that cluster around the knuckles of extended fingers.
In “Letters to Russ,” reflected light from a window accentuates the creases in her boyfriend’s face and rumpled shirt as he reads a handwritten missive.
Poetry and artwork “are my truth that I bear to all who have suffered over their abuse,” she wrote five years ago. “It is time to face our shadows in full honesty and rise above our pain in full embrace of our totality so that we may finally live without fear and full of love.”
For Spiro’s artwork, see philasophia.com. For her photography, see meghanspiro.com.
