Dan Meisner:

Fade to Blue

Daniel J. Meisner (1951 – 2005) arrived in Florida in the 1970s from Chicago.  He was a performing artist, singing and playing lead guitar with several local bands.

In the 1980s he picked up clay again.  He had played with it in high school and loved it, so when he closed his restaurant in the mid-1980s he enrolled in a throwing class at the Morean Arts Center, formerly known as the Arts Center. He was thrilled to have his hands in the mud again.

Dan quickly found his niche and created a body of Raku fired funerary vessels, then expanded into creating large figurative mixed media pieces after participating in a doll-themed exhibit. Dan loved chemistry so all his glazes were original recipes.

In the late 1980s Dan started exhibiting throughout the state of Florida at outdoor fine art festivals such as Gasparilla, Mainsail, Images and countless others.  For years he exhibited in an average of 20 outdoor fine art shows per year.  Also, during this time, he began teaching at the Morean, the Dunedin Fine Arts Center and the Suntan Art Center.

Throughout the 1990s he enjoyed sharing his craft with countless students.  Dan loved to learn so he attended as many workshops as possible with master craftsmen.  He would come away from these workshops with renewed enthusiasm for the medium and his work would reflect the influences of the craftsmen he studied with.  Those who knew Dan knew his deep love of the mud, his enthusiasm for the spoken word and his huge and wonderful hugs that were always free at any art show.

His work is represented in several corporate collections and countless private collections worldwide.

The Morean wishes to thank Melissa Meisner for her friendship and for allowing us to share Dan’s extraordinary work with our community once again.