Neal Smith-Willow

About the Artist:

The premise of my work of is to record my experiences - filtered through sight, and touch - to create images of fleeting moments so that they may remain.

Painterly realism strikes me as the best vehicle for that effort, the kind offered by Edgar Degas, Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent among many. For the content of my work, I seek out the individuals and places of my times to put to canvas.

In that respect I admire the vision of the New York Ashcan movement at the beginning of the 20th century. A revolution in American art, it produced an unprecedented vision of the working people in Manhattan as well as the pastimes of the middle class. The Ashcan artists did not stay cutting edge for long, as the wave of abstract art swept away their American-bred realism.

Today the genre of painterly realism, as in the past, invariably includes the environments that sensually surrounded the artist with the new. I search for those moments as I move about, storing them to accommodate my muse. I strive to be an interpreter, through painterly depictions of memory for impressions of place.

This may open a window that will invite the viewer to glimpse a moment that was, now washed away by the current of time. My paintings have become a distilled narrative attempting to connect to the viewer that sense of a moment and it's inevitable passing.

Art & Design Experience

State University of NY 1960-61, Utica, NY — AAS Advertising Design

Art Students League 1961-62, New York, NY — Anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale — Life drawing, Painting

Ringling School of Art 1963-66, Sarasota, FL — BFA Painting major

University of Guanajuato 1969-71, Instituto Allende — MFA Painting major