Anne Neely: Where There's Water    Mar 19 - Apr 25, 2009

I construct a painting like a poem. I find the rhythm and essential movement by beginning organically to build a structure through a series of marks and colors that become more connected to one another as memory and imagination develop in the painting. I work in layers, washes, heavy gestural strokes, sweeps of the palette knife, and scratches, dots, and rectangles. The more I work on a painting the more physical I become until it feels like there is little distinction between where I leave off and where the painting begins.

Although my work has always had a specific content, the act of painting most compels me, guides me and gives me the opportunity to reinvent landscape, the natural world, and myself. Above all, paint can invent a space through the exploration of unchartered territories and imagined landscapes. Painting ignites and empowers my awareness of our diminishing natural resources and, within that vast arena, I have chosen to focus on water above and below the earth and our own skin. Many of these works were created in Maine to pay homage to known water sources like aquifers and lakes and equally to express the lost stillness of place.

Recently in my paintings, a rectangular form has emerged along the horizon, providing a number of possibilities. Here, there can be multiple relationships of man-made things to water, such as a barge carrying goods or a floating pyre that carries the dead to a spiritual homeland. These rectangular forms could serve as a place to arrive amidst the metaphoric, muddy -filled tidal waters, but I find them living on the edge of beauty and foreboding.