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Fen		Approaching
Clearing		Backwater
Unravelled Territories		Imagine
Distant Land

My parents fostered in me and my siblings an abiding love for nature, its tangible manifestations of sky, sea, and land as well as its intimations of the unseen, the infinite, and its invitation to imagine.

I found painting to be the most compelling way to continue my connection to nature and delve more deeply into the unseen. It has been through the practice and process of painting that I reference those early childhood memories viscerally, triggering them with what I observe, read, and know in my contemporary world. Because it is very important for me to "wonder" as I paint, I approach painting by asking questions, just as a scientist does, and it is through my investigation of these questions that a painting is built with one curiosity layered on top of another. I start by pouring paint on a canvas to make a base and further define a structure. As I paint I find that each piece gives me a thread to follow for the next painting, and gradually a body of work emerges.

My own visual language of mark-making has developed over the years, so that each painted stroke helps me find new configurations of the natural world through space, color and form. These marks consist of circles, squares, and rectangles and the sum total of these gestures explores uncharted territories of imagined landscapes. In their labor-intensive accumulation, the marks help define the passage of time both in the work and in the course of making it.

When I dwell in a place, it becomes embedded in me. When I observe a place, there is a conversation between the observed and me that leads to an interpretation through memory, idea, and imagination. What remains is an experiential transformation of that place, and what remains in me is the transformation of being there.

Anne Neely
2016

Anne Neely: Water Stories
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, 529 West 20th Street 6W, New York, NY
April 23 — May 23, 2015

Beneath		Splash
Tidal		Urban Marsh
Aglow		Bedrock

Anne Neely — Water Stories: A Conversation in Paint and Sound
Museum of Science, Boston
July 2014 – January 2015

Troubled Waters		Lost (River)
Alchemy Soup		Spill
Gush		Runoff
Offshore		Squall

Bloom

Calving

Within

Without

Mopang: Recent Paintings
Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York, NY
September/October 2011

Catalog with essay by Jonathan Franzen

Mopang		Cahoosic
Pond Park		Kettle Hole
Off Island		Waterborne
Moons Over Mopang		Levee
Plain		Perseids

"Kettle Hole (2010–11) could be a forest under a night sky beyond a field of ice, or a bed of lake flora over another bed of limestone. Packets of color, formed by the knifing of white onto a fiendishly complicated background, cross the chilly scene. They look like coded messages, parcels en route to points east and west of the painting. The speeding, abstracted traffic brings Julie Mehretu to mind, though Neely does a more convincing job cohering the flurry of marks into a painting...

Neely never allows the sentiment behind a work to turn into sentiment in the work. She has felt the problem with great depth, yet at no expense to her artistry. Thus she can produce paintings like Tidal (2010), a fiery Divisionist landscape under a sweeping orange sky. Its summery dots could be joyful. Its blue mass in the distance could be a scorched, disappearing lake. The painting understates the message, keeping within the borders of art, where it excels."
—Franklin Einspruch, artcritical.com, October 6, 2011

Just the Elements
Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA
October 2008

These paintings were part of a solo exhibition, "Just the Elements: New Paintings", October 4 – November 5, 2008 at
Alpha Gallery, 38 Newbury Street, Boston, MA.

Catalog with foreword by William Corbett.

Just the Elements		Sediment
Strata		Reversing Tides

"The 15 breathtaking works here, ranging in size from a sheet of legal paper to 5 by 7 feet, have roots in the visible components of the natural world. But unlike some of Neely's earlier prints and paintings, which featured recognizable plant forms and landscapes, these pieces fracture and distill land, sky, and water into total abstraction...Neely celebrates the unlimited possibilities within a finite numbe of elements — in paint or on the periodic table."
— "Anne Neely, Alpha, Boston", Joanne Silver, ARTnews, April 2009

"With her imagination, she probes ideas: water resources, aquifers, layers of earth, connections between the earth's layers and those of smaller organisms. With her brush, she pushes at the boundaries of landscape with a giddy array of marks and colors, all stretching in horizontal bands across linen backing...Neely's works are serious; they offer so much to the eye, and they touch upon water's potential scarcity. Still, the sheer joy in their making cannot be missed."
— "'Elements' pushes landscape to its boundaries," Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe, Wednesday, October 8, 2008

"The little paintings are a clue to the big ones. They tell the viewer that what Neely absorbed underwent the powerful compressing force of her imagination. Her big paintings are packed but have a lyrical flow. She is painting all of what her imagination has given her in a mosaic of earthy and ethereal colors. This show may be "just" the elements but it achieves a powerful simultaneity of means and ends."
— from the essay "Anne Neely: Just the Elements" by William Corbett

Lethe

Green River

Rill

Last Look

"With this show the basic elements hold things together such as the abstracted landscape theme or how the paint and color are varied. This permits Neely to free-range around her boundaries and sometimes to jump a fence or two while taking us with her...Neely endows...all her work with enough abstract ambiguity to similarly free up interpretations. While it's clear that she is interested in a particular theme for the subject matter, as a viewer you can follow aong or carve your own path."
— Joseph Walentini, Abstract Art Online, March 15, 2007

Anne Neely: Going West
Catherine Hammond Gallery, Glengarriff, West Cork, Ireland
July/August 2005

Going West

Against the Sky

"Neely has a nice, light touch, and her paintings could be seen as a series of meditations on or inspired by landscape... She had two ideas running through her mind: ‘the pervasive sense of the Irish past and the constant relationship of land to weather.’ While the starting point is (County) Mayo, Neely’s concerns are more general, touching on our relationship with nature, with the way the land weighs us down or sets us free, and how it offers us imaginative space."
— Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, August 12, 2005

Anne Neely: The Edge of the World
Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York, NY
February/March 2005

Arc

Primal Soup

"Working in a hierarchical manner, the bottom half of Neely’s canvases in her current show are tenuous, illusionistic landscapes that create the effect of deep skies...Clustered at the top of her work is the place reserved for vibrant, painterly, quilty balloons, as if dreams of paintings yet to be realized. It’s a great mix where the fleshy paint handling of an artist like Joan Snyder meets the pulpy details of a Stettheimer or the feminist iconographer Miriam Shapiro."
— David Spiher, Gay City News, Volume 4, March 3–9, 2005

"Metaphorically these paintings offer a madcap urban sensibility: a purview of a city as a vibrant living organism."
— Joseph Walentini, Abstract Art OnLine, New York Views March 1

Island Dance

Giacometti's Garden

"Neely has described her work as holding the tension between spirit and matter. These new paintings feel more like spirits exultant triumph over matter: they’re giddy and playful."
— Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe, Taking Landscapes to a new horizon," Review

"Neely is clearly adept at using the vocabulary of abstraction to seek out meaning in earthly, as well as ethereal, phenomena."
— Cynthia Nadelman, Art News, National Reviews, March 2004

Night Garden

Rising, Flower, Green

"While Neely’s single flower as subject matter is indebted to Piet Mondrian’s floral works, her spontaneous handling of paint calls to mind such Abstract Expressionists as Joan Mitchell, Neely’s pleasure in the material is most obvious in her frequent addition of jewel-tone slabs of paint that jut out from the canvas. It’s a brilliant touch. The small chunk forces the eye to snap back from the comfort of familiar imagery and into the composition’s nuances, in which the abundance of the garden is transformed into a bounty of abstract possibilities."
— Mary Sherman, Art News, National Reviews, March 2002