Harding Meyer’s unique idiom draws its strength from precisely such contrasts: revealment and concealment, intimacy and reserve, tradition and innovation, portrait and landscape, figuration and abstraction. There is scarcely a segment of a canvas that, if extrapolated from the whole, might not be read as an abstract composition – above all, of course, the non-illusionist backgrounds, which eschew any suggestion of context or locale. 

Meyer creates a pictorial “horizon” delineated by the eyes of his subjects and accentuated by the horizontal structure of the eye itself.  The total composition is thus indeed structured like a landscape, while the textured surface, typically free of any explicit spatial reference, stretches unbroken across the entire canvas.  Viewer and subject are vis-à-vis, literally seeing “eye to eye”. 

--- From Pentimenti Redux by David Galloway, published in ‘Harding Meyer, A Monograph‘