Neil Nelson works from a studio near the Northumberland coast — one of the most dramatically beautiful and weather-exposed stretches of coastline in Britain — and the landscape is present in everything he makes. His large-scale oil paintings move between realism and abstraction in the way that the landscape itself moves between clarity and obscurity: vast panoramic expanses, dark chasms, distant pools of light, icy wastelands, raging seas, brewing storms. A world forged by time and elemental force rather than human intention.
His technique is as physical as his subjects. The surfaces are formed by gouging, scraping, slicing, erasing, and rebuilding — paint treated as a material with its own properties rather than simply a medium for depicting something else. He adds marble dust to thicken and add body, beeswax for translucency and surface quality, sand for texture. "I quite like the idea of having actual materials from the earth going into my landscape paintings," he has said — the paintings carrying something of the physical reality of the terrain they depict.
Born in Berwick upon Tweed in 1977, Nelson studied fine art before being accepted into Studio Escalier, a classical art school in the South of France, on the strength of an exhibition in New York. He has since exhibited in galleries from London to Australia, been featured in the Daily Mail Weekend Magazine and New York Arts magazine, and spoken about his work at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
His Echoes Range and Dreamtide series — atmospheric works in which the landscape is approached through mood and atmosphere rather than topographic description — are available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
