Leo John Meissner had a dedicated passion for landscapes and seascapes, although initially in his career he depicted gritty scenes of New York city in the manner of the Ashcan School. He developed an early interest in the arts, becoming proficient in both oils and pastels, but his mastery of detailed woodcuts and wood engravings established him as an artist of note.
Meissner was born in Hamtramck, an enclave north of Detroit, Michigan, where there was an early Dodge motor company plant which had attracted many people from Poland. His parents were immigrants from Bohemia in eastern Europe, now a part of the Czech Republic. Supporting himself mostly with office work, he studied art at the John Wicker School of Art, which until 1911 had been known as the Detroit Fine Art Academy. Meissner attended classes there for five years until he was drafted in 1917; he served overseas until the end of the war. Returning home, he resumed his studies and was awarded a scholarship for classes at the Art Students League in New York, where his primary instructors were George Luks and Robert Henri. His honed skills helped establish his role as assistant art director at Charm magazine.
With earnings from his post, in 1923 Meissner made his first visit to Monhegan Island, located off the coast of Maine. He may have been inspired to do so by Henri, who went there twenty years before, or George Bellows, also a student of Henri, who started going to the island in 1913. Monhegan is known for its rocky coastline and rustic lifestyle which helped transform it into an art colony. Meissner regularly returned to the island throughout his life, and explained: “Monhegan was definitely the place I was looking for. The cliffs and surf and huge arch of twinkling stars overhead were completely new discoveries to the boy from New York.”
From 1926 until 1950 Meissner served as the art director of Motor Boating magazine, published by the Hearst Corporation. Following his retirement he moved from Yonkers, New York, to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and traveled extensively during the winter months to the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and to mountains in southern Arizona. In 1969, he was elected a full academician of the National Academy of Design where a prize in printmaking was named in his honor. He was a prolific artist; during his career of half a century he created one hundred and fifty relief prints, usually in editions of fifty. While skilled in various types of printmaking, his preference was for wood engraving, although while traveling in North Carolina and Arizona he tended to use oils. He maintained: “Nothing should divert the flow of thought to the paper or canvas; it should be instinctive, automatic, personal.”