Jean McNeil
Jean McNeil was born in 1940 and spent her childhood in the USA and France, but has lived in Britain for most of her adult life. She started to paint in her late thirties and studied art at the Camden Institute, the City Lit (under Cecil Collins) and Hornsey Art School (then Middlesex Polytechnic). For the past three decades she has been inspired by East Anglian land and seascapes, and now lives in Wivenhoe near Colchester. She has held solo exhibitions in galleries in London and East Anglia and taken part in many group shows; a retrospective of her work, A Life in Painting, was held in 2015. Her work is held in many private collections. She is a member of the Colchester Art Society.
Artist Statement
My work has always been grounded in the observation of landscape and seascape, mainly in East Anglia. I am drawn to relatively featureless expanses, searching for patterns that organise land, vegetation, water, clouds. At first I would only observe and record, then I wanted more and more to recreate patterns that would suggest the natural events rather than depicting them literally. I now increasingly let go of the horizon and focus on forces such as gravity, growth and atmosphere. I have usually worked in oils, acrylics or gouache, but recently experiments with monoprint and collage have introduced a more random element. I mainly work on paper, usually about 35 x 45 cm, most often in series, which can make finding titles difficult! I love drawing and painting in the open, but always go on to transform the work in the studio.