Blessings: The Works of Irene Neal

"I paint with all that I am----that somehow the best of my strengths will become visible to those who stand in front of my art -- so they, too, can feel in their soul, the beauty and greatness of this life."Irene NealIrene Neal has worked in many mediums for five decades producing thousands of happy customers who have bought her art at many exhibitions and shows in many countries around the world even on Maven to Mars. "I paint with all that I am----that somehow the best of my strengths will become visible to those who stand in front of my art -- so they, too, can feel in their soul, the beauty and greatness of this life." Irene NealShe works in a tradition of large size freeform abstraction, originating with Jackson Pollock, the Abstract Expressionists, and the Color Field Painters. She reinterprets this tradition by means of a new, state -of the-art, acrylic paints, and gels, which have undergone an extraordinary development in recent years. In these free form abstract paintings, Irene Neal aspires to the brilliant accident, the miraculous frozen moment in the flow of paint."Ms. Irene Neal favors amorphous formats that resemble liquid drops, and often she creates a sheen like that of semi-precious stones..."William Zimmer, New York Times, 1996"The recent work of Irene Neal would seem to be (her) strongest: increasingly sculptural paintings that stem from a prolonged meditation on the proper balance of improvisation and conscious will in making art."Ken Carpenter, Art in America, 1999"What the paintings are about is where they come from the inner world of emotions, feelings and intuitive response. The result is an art that has its own nature, unique in spirit and form and capable of evoking that rare and exciting combination of revelation, discovery and personal connection with timeless and enduring quality."John B. Henry III Dir Flint Institute of the Arts"Neal aspires to the brilliant accident, the miraculously frozen moment in the flow of paint. Whether on canvas, paper or plexiglass, Neal shows herself to be a master painter."Kenworth W. Moffett"It is hard to find a better word than the French jouissance to convey the pleasure that Irene Neal's paintings embody and explore, and that she takes in making them. She seems to will the surge of colors - primary colors and earth colors - out of the surrounding blackness, an emotional as well as aesthetic triumph of pointing.”Donald Kuspit“This show differs from other work by her I've seen, since it's watercolors on paper instead of the globs of acrylic and gel for which she is better known. But, being the old-fashioned person am, I maybe liked it even better-certainly, felt that Neal had a better command of her medium, and so was able to achieve bold and yet contained effects. To say the works are in watercolor isn't enough in the sense that watercolors are usually applied with brushes, and these paintings are poured, but not like Pollock and not like Frankenthaler and not like Poons or anybody else."Piri Halasz "The most important things are the paint and the color," Neal has said, "and what the color does when it shapes itself." The result is fresh and original as one comes away with the sensation of having looked at a distant continent, on a planet somewhere deep in the cosmos, with its landscape of rivers, lakes, mountains and seas bathed in color and light.Sue Scott“You have the gift, a creative love of life! You are a true master. Thank you for sharing your inspired works.”Donald Kuspit, October 3rd, 2022 Read more