Page 4 - Charles Neal -web biography_Handy

Over the last 20 years , Neal has been travelling to France and Italy with his wife and fellow artist, painting under the name of Susan Lane.
The principle French regions being Normandie, Bretagne, Paris and the Charente region, with short trips to Provence. In Italy the painting trips
have been to the Lakes in summer and the Alps in winter. The extensive travel and variation in subject and composition has provided the
opportunity to discover or relate to other Artist’s who have painted the same genre.

From 2000, Neal has made an emphasis on the importance of colour in his works, in a way that creates primary focal and sub
harmonies ,which simultaneously link inner compositional structures as well as an overlay to the motif to establish an emotional presence.

Neal has been interested in the works of a number of groups of painters from the Impressionist movement , especially the American painters,
Childe Hassam , Karl Anderson and Frederick Frieseke, Post Impressionists and Fauvists ; Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard , early works by
Henri Matisse and the Italian painter Carlo Fornara.

In 2010 Neal held his first Alter Realist exhibition at Campbell’s gallery in London, and has continued to paint Alter Realist compositions as
part of his range of subjects. Alter Realism is a departure from conventional composition, and the concept is derived from multi faceted
portrayal of Cubism yet is a fusion of the aestheticism of Surrealism - Symbolism .

Charles Neal, sees his development in painting as a poetical visual expression, inspired by the relationship between society and Nature, yet the
work reaches out beyond mere recall .
Landscape is important to Neal, he expressed his thoughts in a introduction to his 2005 New York exhibition, entitled ‘Ambiance’ presented by
Wally Findlay Galleries.

‘The land retains for us our history, identity and in many cases testimony to our individual lives, deeds, actions and presence of our casual
sojourn of daily round.

It acts as a physical stage on which we enact our being, each moment in time and at a point in space and our animated self, interacts with the
surrounding environment; when absent from this space we no longer assume a contribution or relationship.
The land separate from human intervention, has its own history and natural progression evolving through other primordial rhythms of change.
Yet more apparent in today’s world, the process of change for the natural environment is inextricably related to man’s proceedings.

Each parcel of land could relate a story, the same soil trodden and enacted upon, all of these events punctuated through time, their physical
evidence often just separated by the depth of soil’. For each composition, Neal finds there is ever present a fine balance between the degree to
which abstraction is made as a response, and that of faithful rendering of Nature’s intrinsic beauty.