The artistic career of John Meredith has been difficult to define within the framework of movements and styles typically associated with the contemporary art of his generation. As a result, his work stands out as unique. The younger brother of artist William Ronald, Meredith studied at the Ontario College of Art from 1950-1953 and was particularly influenced by instructor Jock Macdonald. His work of the 1960s was fraught with ambiguity, at once abstract, yet filled with almost organic references to the external world. A significant discovery for Meredith, as seen in Primeval, was the vertical line, blurred at the edges, which he imposed on works that otherwise seemed to reference hard-edge abstraction.