joseph scissorhands: Elizabeth Neel I Limb after Limb

Elizabeth Neel - Disposal, 2021

"Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done." - Elizabeth Neel.

Installation View

It can be really exciting to discover a new artist whose work both fascinates and inspires you. I found just such an artist at Pilar Corrias's new gallery on Savile Row, across the street from the Royal Academy of Arts. The paintings of Elizabeth Neel were a revelation to me. the language of her gestural, painterly abstractions had me fired up, and recognising many of the tropes of abstract expressionism that I have been researching of late. Neel comes from a fine artistic lineage, being the grand-daughter of esteemed portrait painter Alice Neel. According to the Pilar Corrias website this new body of work was concieved to be displayed in the nave, apse and transept of a deconsecrated church, and explores themes of physicality, suffering, transformation, resuscitation and redemption, created on her family's farm in Vermont during the pandemic. What drew me to Neel's work was the sense of urgency in her experimental, yet sophisticated range of mark-making. Neel employs a knowing array of painterly mark-making devices in her canvases such as the use of her fingers, mono-printing techniques, and painting rollers to make marks on the canvas. Also impressive among her repertoire is her technique of pouring paints onto the canvas then folding sections of her canvases to create Rorchach test-like mirror images in paint which she then works into further with more poured paint spatters, graphic symbolism, or feathery/painterly brushwork to create something uniquely her own. The way in which she leaves negative space in the raw canvas around her painterly mark marking allowing the works to breathe was also admired.