Landscape painting is the embodiment of an idealized, Romantic notion of nature that has very little to do with reality. The painting of landscape, both in subject and execution, is about making manifest that unattainable ideal. Nathaniel Meyer embraces this search for the ideal––the worlds he depicts are fictions, but are also possessed of their own inner logic: a storybook logic, with a storybook’s sense of grandeur. His paintings are an amalgam of recollected memory, nostalgia, direct observation, art-historical research, and pure invention. Drawing inspiration from such disparate elements as Golden Age illustration, 8-bit video games, and comic-book splash pages, Meyer uses unambiguous, hard-edged specificity to create an idealized and consciously artificial representation of the complexity of the natural world. Less interested in the accurate hues of a landscape, Meyer’s rendering is believable but not realistic. These paintings depict unattainable utopias, evoking a sense of hope and yearning.