I see my work as having a relationship to the visual world, not just some emotive residue of my feelings. It relates to something that exists, or might exist, rather than a transcendent mental state or something like that.
I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare.
The violence in New York feels really mundane and banal to me. Whereas in the privacy of one's own home, say, like the farm I grew up on in Vermont, the kinds of things that can happen seem much more extreme. Maybe because it's more personal. Or maybe because you block out the things that happen in the city. But it's like seeing things born, live, die, fall apart, and start over again, without any intermediary clean-up steps from some corporate organization.
When you see something every day, it gets into your brain.
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.
I had studied history at Brown and didn't feel like doing anything with it. What does one do with a history degree besides become a historian? And the professors in school, it seemed like they were just writing books for other professors to comment on, and vice versa - it was the most self-referential, boring world you could ever imagine.
All I can say is that when I paint, I am looking at things that are in the world.
When I eat, I always pick out the best parts in the middle and leave everything else on the side. It becomes a big sculptural mess, but there are nice compositional elements about how it all sits on the table.
Even though I don't have any larger spiritual or ideological system, there is some logic in concert with a huge number of beautiful, disconcerting, screwed-up variables that results in a certain visual pleasure in violent things. Like a broken egg yolk can be the most violent thing I've seen all day, if I'm in the right mood. But also tons of trash in the woods or a burned-up trailer park can also come across as especially violent.
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Alice Neel Visual Artist
Andrew Neel Filmmaker
