STATEMENT

After living several decades on the planet, I tend to just talk about painting now. I think it’s because after trying, in my small way, to save humanity’s tenuous grip on the world, that world just kept becoming more of a mess. So now I look with a more selective eye for anything that will stir me because to create something like a painting is to imagine and I like to stay in the land of the imagination as long as life permits.

Once I am engaged in a painting, each brushstroke can move like a symphony in its use of color and form, evoking time and space. Then each part of a painting is broken down into musical parts that help guide the viewer’s eye in and around the painting to find, each time, a new part to engage in.

My paintings emerge from looking at the immense beauty our earth offers us. And then, imagining the ever emergent foreboding placed on top of our planet, I sometimes slab on a palette knife filled with darkened colors, to make an even more frightening world: beauty and foreboding.

I paint one type of sentiment next to an opposing one, adding a degree of agitation that pushes the movement and shift that go on in a painting. I have found that these contradictions within a painting carry ideas that scratch each other. Then the painting has a chance of becoming magical the longer the one looks.

Anne Neely
2023