Elizabeth Neel

Brooklyn-based painter, Elizabeth Neel graduated with an MFA from Columbia University in 2007. “Make No Bones” at Deitch Projects in SoHo is her second solo exhibition. For three hours, the painter and I sat on the Deitch gallery floor and talked about details of her process and her content choices.

Her compositions reflect mastery of colour, form, space, and mark making and possess a presentminded awareness of the body in relation to the boundaries of the canvas. They flirt with representation and dispel any cynic’s claim that nothing new can be said with paint. Elizabeth Neel is the granddaughter of portrait painter Alice Neel (1900–1984). I asked her what it’s like to have such a formidable painter as a grandmother. Her struggle, she said, in this regard was initially not in craft but in finding a way of working outside realist painting.

Deitch Projects houses five large oil paintings on canvas, 7 by 8 feet; six smaller oils, 23 by 18 inches; and in the smaller exhibition space, ten framed acrylic paintings on paper no bigger than 24 by 19 inches. The works on paper were done mostly in Nova Scotia and Vermont, while spending time with family. Neel paints on pads of paper standing over a table, so she can be just a torso’s distance away. Over a certain size, though, she says it’s impossible to see and work with the entire piece effectively. Thanksgiving, 2008, suggests that split second where a turkey with spread tail feathers is, unhappily, having its head blown off. Blood shoots to the left, and in the centre is a convincing, glistening pool of congealed liquid and membrane. There’s one recurring erasure mark that logically comes at the end of many of her paintings: soft, dry painted puffs that censor the information behind. This gesture serves formally to push the entire composition back in space, situating the viewer at a safe distance from the violence in the picture and in Neel’s imagination.

The artist says she steers away from perfect square canvases since she finds they tend to have a conceptual program, but obvious rectangles aren’t desirable either. Too vertical and it becomes figurative. Extreme horizontal is a landscape. Canvas size is dictated by the practical reality of needing to move the supports around by herself throughout her working process, evidencing a motion in the making and representation.

Before, during and after working on a painting, she lists words relating to sets of topics that are on her mind. Subject matter stems from things seen, read or heard. She is interested in stories or situations that involve conflict or a problem. As a painting evolves, new references surface, and using these references she surfs online for more images and information. “It actually helps that images online are low resolution,” she says. Using degraded 72 DPI source material, with their loosely viewed associations, forces her skills as a painter. Invariably the starting point disappears underground, with little or no visible traces at the painting’s completion. Choosing titles is an organic and linguistic process that parallels the language of mark making. The course of titling evolves with increasing latitude for shifts—continuous and subtle— that end up sounding informal and playful.

Sideshow, 2008, is informed by Victorian freak shows, contortionists and photographs from the Depression. For her, the choice to position centrally the only recognizable image, which was a “clichéd” fish head (and some nicely etchedin fish scales), was uncomfortable and embarrassing; yet because of that, it felt right in its wrongness. Elements swirl in an expansive vocabulary of greyish circular marks interrupted by gravity-defying, horizontal paint drips.

Humpndump, 2008, was an offhand term invented by her friend referring to a careless approach to dating. It sounds cute like a fairytale creature but is also disturbing, she said. The canvas is slightly more vertical (figurative) than horizontal, anthropomorphizing the only representational ingredient: blue outlines of dogs, or maybe a single frenzied dog, with a humansized, raw naked thigh. Peeled pink-peach-red flesh tones induce compassion as we relate this beast to the human condition. Energetic brushwork bends the background up into the foreground, vibrating in a shallow depth of space. Working or source imagery included Dutch and Medieval hunting paintings and photos of piled up animals shot at rendering dumps.

Count to Ten, 2008, was made in response to Neel’s childhood memory of a beloved barn burned by a mentally unstable man and his sidekick. The tragedy of the event corresponds with a more generally understood gothic American paradigm of rural violence. The title of the piece, she said, engages with the apprehension of an event as well as a strategy for imposing calm through the logical act of counting. A stage of architectural forms and billows of orange or grey reminded me of Monet’s 1877 painting of the Saint-Lazare train station in Paris.

There are connections in Elizabeth Neel’s work with Philip Guston, Caravaggio, and with the aggression of Francis Bacon, but more prevalent as influence is the work of non-painters—videos by Neel’s boyfriend, Uri Aran, or Paul Pfeiffer, as well as the three-dimensional work of Isa Genzken, whose formal rigour transforms castaway materials into beautiful and classical assemblage.

It is Neel’s wish never to bore the viewer with artwork that dictates answers. Rather, her painting consciously remains one of possibilities and questions implicating audience participation, with her gentle guidance in forming a viewer’s own associations and meaning. ❚

Elizabeth Neels’s “Make No Bones” was exhibited at Deitch Projects in New York from November 6 to December 6, 2008.

Charmaine Wheatley is a Canadian performance artist living in New York. In 2009 a new bookwork titled 30% of Buffalo will be published by Brooklyn Artists Alliance.