Beth Neville Reflects on Her Art

Monumentally Sized Paintings

Eternal Recurrence of the Same

Eternal Recurrence of the Same is my first monumental painting. The complete story behind the painting is recorded in the artist’s diary that I kept while conceiving the idea behind the images and executing them. The acrylic painting, (5 feet high by 70 feet long) is part of a trilogy that includes Caves to Cosmos. A third segment is planned based on the DNA strand as a motif. Below is a summary of the major themes addressed in Eternal Recurrence of the Same.

The overarching theme is creativity on many levels. On the most basic level, mountains and volcanoes change physically as part of Earth’s geological creativity. On the second level, the eroding and exploding mountains symbolize the artist’s personal creative efforts to dream new ideas, to execute them, and to evaluate them after they are completed. On this level the actual tension of thinking, the tiring physical work of painting, and the exhaustion and usual let down after completing a work are depicted. On the third level, the mountains’ metamorphosis from quiescent old ranges to new volcanic peaks symbolizes the human creative cycle of birth, active mature life, and death. And finally, on the fourth level, the creation of the cosmos is symbolized: its fiery birth, expansion, and potential for a future implosive death of “time.” If one believes in a Divine Creator of the entire cosmos, as I do, the creator can be imagined as the force behind nature depicted in Eternal Recurrence of the Same.

Panel #1, The Quiet Mountains. Old mountains, a blend of images of the Wasatch Range in Utah and the Catskill Mountains in New York State, are centrally placed in the canvas. Above them a placid summer sky with a few cumulous clouds is depicted. Below, the foothills of the mountains are dotted with an evergreen forest. The bottom quadrant displays a potent symbol for death, the Great White Sands National Park, where mounds of pulverized gypsum form graceful peaks and valleys. All is quiet, peaceful and almost timeless.

Panel #2, Lightning Strikes the High Peaks. The creative spark for change is symbolized by the lightning strike. The calm mountains of the previous panel have risen to become surreal jagged peaks, the distant ones illuminated by a divine lightning strike. Valleys filled with glaciers separate the foreground peaks. The hot drifting white sand dunes have been gradually transformed into curves of cold blue ice.

Panel #3, Cold and Hot Calderas. The icy valleys lead into a huge cold caldera on the left, its open maw filled with green glacial striations, pulling the viewer down to an unknown fate. On the right a blazing hot caldera spews forth a giant volcanic shower of sparks and fire extending across 17 feet of canvas on three panels.

Panel #4 The Fire Fall. Painted in luminous, vivid colors that range across the entire artist’s palette, the fire–fall leads directly to the 5th panel. The Fire Fall motif is similar to the Rainbow in Caves to Cosmos, and has been depicted in several Earth, Air, Fire, Water paintings and in my drawings and scrolls.

Panel #5, Explosion. Painted when the space shuttle Challenger exploded killing all astronauts on board, the explosion is the painting’s most dynamic and central image. It is painted in the most original coloration of all the panels, including intense red/green hues as well as soft pastel pink/lavender pairings. At the lower right, the colors and brush strokes are reminiscent of stained glass at Chartres Cathedral.

Panel #6, LavaFlow. Based on an earlier painting in the Earth, Air, Fire, Water series, Lava Flow depicts the type of volcanic activity seen in Hawaii, where molten lava descends over the countryside down to the sea. This version is far more painterly that my earlier work, especially in the dark areas. Instead of using only black, the dark areas are lively combinations of deep blues, maroons, and velvety blacks. Occasional flecks of red and green further intensify the coloring. Above the flowing lava, a fire jets upward with sparks blowing to the right, leading into the next volcanic panel.

Panel #7, Spiral Jetty in Flames. Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork, Spiral Jetty, is the geological image for the spiral of earth in flames. More fanciful than Lava Flow, the jetty dances with fire. The leaping flames above the spiral were painted to resemble women dancing in wild gyrations. Passion, intensity, and creative activity are all symbolized by the two lava paintings. This is the culmination of creativity.

Panel # 8 Ash Cloud and Panel #9 Navada del Ruiz. Ash Cloud is based on the photos of Mt. St. Helen’s deadly volcanic outburst. I had previously made many works of art about Mt. St. Helens including drawings, etchings, monoprints and scrolls. Nevada del Ruiz, a volcano in South America, is one of those incredible human tragedies that few people remember despite the fact that in the explosion 25,000 people died in a slide of boiling earth. No one was left alive to grieve and the bodies were entombed in mud. The Ash Cloud and Navada del Ruiz symbolize decline, decay, depression and death on four levels:

1. Mountains explode and change geologically
2. Artists complete their canvases.
3. Mature adults face death and are replaced by younger generations.
4. The Creator’s cosmos continues to spin out its galactic history in time and space.

Panel #10, Future Possibilities. Being somewhat of an optimist I do not want to end my creation on such a negative note. Mountains change; new generations of artists emerge; grandchildren are born and become creative adults; and the Cosmos? We don’t know the End of God’s Creation. Will time cease, as reported in the New York Times, 2/17/04? Or will everything compress into a Black Hole? Or expand forever, drifting farther and farther into a chaotic unknowable universe? Or is our knowledge, based on explorations by Hubble, Mars’ Rovers, and Cosmic Background Radiation satellites, about one small universe inside others, sort of a Russian nesting–universe doll? I don’t know. The last panel contains both positive and negative imagery. From the top: The mechanistic clouds are similar to those I remember from childhood when horrible weather was on the way with winds that would blow barns down. The clouds are painted with ugly yellow and purple colors. Next, a more positive image; the Red Fuji, a quotation from Japanese prints, juts above my beloved Catskill Mountains. Rip Van Winkle, the old man in the mountain, is seen to the left in the ancient mountain range. Its foothills are covered by a soft fog gathering over the Hudson River. This is a vision I saw every Fall from the windows of Hudson High School. Below, the fog dissipates into an azure sky that is a background for the "Red Desert." Based on my memory of driving East away from the Rocky Mountains, the increasingly aired land becomes more barren and deathly. Below the “Red Dessert” is a bizarre section of painting. A veritable forest of caldera is entwined in some neurotic landscape for a disturbed soul, the twisted caldera presenting an impenetrable landscape to the deranged traveler. But, behold, the caldera evolve into gentle farm hills and fields; fertile, golden, grassy, and abundant with life. The fields are painted with the same technique and imagery with which I made my first oil painting at age l3, while sitting on the patio of my parent's apple farm. Thus, Eternal Recurrence of the Same ends with a wide range of emotions and future possibilities.

Caves to Cosmos

Caves to Cosmos is a monumentally sized canvas, height 5 feet by length 49 feet. Topically it explores the history of human creativity, from ancient prehistoric cave pictographs to our newest knowledge of the beginnings of the cosmos.

The painting is part of a trilogy, of which the first two paintings are completed. Eternal Recurrence of the Same constitutes the first segment (5' x 70'). The last segment (size to be determined) will employ a DNA strand as a motif and will explore the evolution of life on planet Earth, as we know it today.

Caves to Cosmos is made of seven panels each 5' x 7' which may be displayed as a complete unit, or singly. The acrylic paint is applied in very small independent strokes often 1/4 inch in size. The surface result is like a tapestry made of many bright, scintillating dots similar to Pointillism.

In every panel the artist has included quotations from other art, artists and art styles. Therefore, the painting reflects the evolution of human knowledge, and the history of art. Beginning with ancient cave writings and drawings, the motifs evolve through historical time to the present.

Panel #1, Ancient Human Creativity, uses Paleolithic pictographs, Lascaux cave art, Australian aboriginal art, African sculpture, Cycladic idles, Easter Island stone heads, and Assyrian art. The setting is an ancient rock cave, which incorporates imaginary monsters. In the opening of the cave a view of the Big Sur of California coast is visible, an image intended to be a jewel — like a Faberge Egg. Along the coast, the ice plants turn red in fall weather and the color mixes with a transitional scene including Christo’s Umbrellas placed along Route #5 outside of Los Angeles. (The artist was present at the moment a woman spectator was crushed by one of the umbrellas in a violent wind.)

Panel #2, Agrarian Revolution, depicts the Garden of Eden, as a rose ranch in ’s friends, co–owner of the rose ranch died of AIDS) In the upper left, two farmers (the artist’s parents) are painted as a quotation from Millet’s praying peasants. Placed at the “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow, the basket contains apples, not potatoes. In the lower right a rose ranch worker harvests long stemmed roses in a basket, (a symbol of fertility) but in his left hand he carries a long scissors, (symbol of the reaper of death.) A multicolored rainbow (a symbol that appears frequently in Neville’s works) arcs overhead, springing from a violent cloud storm in the upper left.

Panel #3, Growth of the World’s Religions, God’s rainbow promise is the central image in this panel, the rainbow painted in a variety of “styles.” In the lower left, stained glass windows are reflected, in the middle gorgeous colors overlap in crisscross strokes. The quality of women’s weaving is evoked. At the apex of the rainbow the artist attempted put the most discordant colors together possible. Violent yellow–greens against vivid orange. Here the colors are intended to vibrate against each other making it difficult for the viewer to focus on their edges. In the upper right, the images change to “birds of flight”, or energy waves. The strokes reflect the patterns of Tlingit Indian work, or North American Indian feather work.

Panel #4, Planet Earth as Icon. Earth as an object in the cosmos is the central image of the entire painting and of this panel. The sphere is surrounded by Byzantine mosaic tesserae setting it off as a jewel. The planet Earth is shown as depicted on maps used by airline pilots with the South Pole shown low. The earth’s blue ocean waters and fertile green land are vulnerable to plundering and human destruction.

Panel #5, Milky Way. The diagram of the “gamma rays” of the Milky Way dominates the central portion of the panel, forming an undulating line, which weaves against the red arrows of the “flow of the River of the Universe” (another image generated by scientific exploration of the cosmos). In the upper left the ancient way of mapping the stars, worked out by Middle East astronomers includes Draco, Pleiades, Bear, Lion, Crab and other constellations. The Flow of the River and the Gamma Rays intertwine in a sexual dance of life.

Panel #6, Space Exploration. The Hubble Telescope, COBE and Gamma Ray observatories provide new visual information about space depicted here. On the extreme left the deaths of astronauts in the pursuit of knowledge is recorded. The various instruments of exploration are tinged with red (blood) and the blood spatters mingle with the red arrows of the previous panels. The central image is Super Nova 1987A, and it is painted in an expressionist manner with violent strokes, jagged lines and conflicting colors. At the upper right another super nova, Cassiopeia, discovered 600 years ago is painted across two panels. The painting style changes to one of “portraiture” as the depiction is taken quite literally from the photo of the event. However, at the edges the gas clouds took on a painterly life of their own and became more concrete, something like “geodes.” As the yellows blobs with red–orange centers became discrete, the artist surrounded them with pale greens to deep green encircling lines, thus forcing a hard edge to the soft gas shapes.

Panel #7, Origins of the Cosmos, In the upper left the Cassiopeia image is completed. In the center and to the right Background radiation from the Big Bang is introduced as a symbol. Because there are no know visual images of this ancient matter, the artist chose to depict it as

1. Rhythmic,
2. Faint,
3. Pulsating waves,
4. Merging to total blackness.

The horizon line is below the 1/2 mark to indicate the slight asymmetry that is thought to have led to change and cosmic evolution. The resulting pattern of glowing reds, blues, browns and blacks is one of the most elegant painterly sections of the entire work.

Earth, Air, Fire, Water series - Oil and Acrylic Paintings

After 16 years of working with photomontage and wood sculptural constructions, I decided to return to painting and use nature as a source for metaphors. In the history of art only recently have natural elements been employed as “stand alone” topics for art. My interest in Earth, Air, Fire, Water is an outgrowth of my farm upbringing and our closeness to the forces of nature as they related to growth and destruction.

Air: Frigid airs froze delicate apple blossoms preventing a crop from developing but warm spring breezes sent dappled clouds across blue skies. Gale winds were terrifying. One autumn a gale blew down our sheep barn and we were thankful it was not our house, which was rocked for three days by the winds. In the acrylic painting, Air, a tornado arises out of an arid plain scouring across the western land. High above, cumulus clouds drift across a blue sky. I attempted to make the invisible (air) visible in a variety of forms. (See Air, in the section on Etchings.)

Water: Warm rains made the apples big, but sudden summer storms of hail, (frozen water) pitted the apples and made them unsaleable. Warm sunny days ripened the fruit, but hot summers with no rain made it bitter and shriveled. On our land we had several dug farm ponds, marshes, a woodland stream and a hand dug well, all sources of water. In Water, (Waterfalls) I combine three views of waterfalls in an imaginary scene, including Bash Bish Falls in eastern Massachusetts. Giant Wave uses the huge curve of a Hawaiian Pacific wave as a symbol for the force of nature. (See Wave, in the section on Etchings.)

Earth: The earth in upstate New York is often stony and hard, but it provides the nutrients to grow fruit and vegetables. Steep hillsides could tip over a Fordson tractor killing the driver, as it did one of my 4–H friends, a 16 year old boy of great promise. (My father always drove Caterpillars because their low heavy treads clung to the hills.) My earth painting Bryce Canyon, is an unusual choice to represent earth, but I on a trip West I was struck by the gorgeous colors and shapes of the wind eroded sandstone rocks. The rock pillars seen by moonlight evoke a complex memory of good and bad, too long to relate here. The Lava Flow paintings also employ earth imagery, but in the violent moments of igneous metamorphosis. They relate directly to the inspiration behind Mt St Helens, (See sections Etchings, and Drawings)

Fire: Fires are not the problem for eastern farmers that they are in western forests, but they remain a constant source of fear. Many old 19th century wood hay barns burned down on farms around us, usually blamed on “spontaneous combustion” from storing damp hay. On my parent’s farm the cow barns had all burned before we owned the land. One evening when I was very young, my sister and I went with my parents to have “pannycakes” at the cottage of old “Uncle Sam” the hired man. During the evening the volunteer fire siren sounded and we raced outdoors in the cool night to see a huge barn fire at the foot of Mellenville hill. It was a spectacular blaze completely leveling the structure. Often there were chimney fires on cold winter nights.

Our own farmhouse caught on fire when mice got into my Mom’s box of wooden sulfur matches and chewed up a spark. My father’s great sense of smell awoke him in the middle of the night to find our kitchen pantry in full blaze. His quick work with a hand fire extinguisher put out the fire, but it was a very close call for all of us as we slept directly above the pantry. My paintings of fire employ the vision of the exploding volcano in a variety of forms. In one, Spiral Jetty in Flames, I have used Robert Smithson’s earthwork as a source for a vision of the "earth on fire." (See the sections Eternal Recurrence of the Same, and Drawings.)

On rural farms we were surrounded by the elements, sometimes benign, sometimes threatening, a daily fact of life. In city and suburban life we live so protected from raw elements that a quick dash in winter to a heated car is about as close as we get to Mother Nature. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books relate an accurate picture of nature’s immediacy from a farm child’s point of view, and when they were read to us as children I understood first hand what was at stake.

Technically for Earth, Air, Fire, Water, I decided to work with acrylic paint on canvas in large scale, height 6 feet by width 4 feet. It is a size that has nice proportions and is big enough to command attention. I was so nervous about trying a new medium and a new subject matter after so many years away from painting, that I began by making full scale detailed “studies” in tempera paint. Most of these I have sold. They were exact renditions, line for line, of the final paintings that I carefully transferred onto the stretched canvas. Soon after completing these works, I abandoned detailed full–scale pre–drawings, but I still carefully plan in pen sketches for every stage of a major painting. The Fine Arts Museum of Long Island owns the 10 preliminary sketches for Eternal Recurrence of the Same, as well as one large painting.

Acrylic Paint on Canvas

My parent’s farm was a visual Garden of Eden. Real farm life had much of the quality of “After the Fall” about it, a constant struggle with hail, frost, bitter winds, drought and nature on the one hand, and the deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II on the other. But visually the landscape, with blue Catskill Mountains in the distance leading one’s eye down to the blooming apple orchards surrounded by 200 year old stone walls and winding dirt roads, was a true Garden of Eden. In my early childhood my parents raised everything they could think of that would grow: 100 sheep, a flock of white geese, goats, pigs, turkeys, chickens, dogs and dozens of cats all vied for space on their 150 acres in Columbia County, New York State. But no cows or horses; my father had had enough of “large animal” care as a teen–age farm boy. (For a narrative of what it was like to live on our farm, read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Farmer Boy.”)

Every spring my father planted a huge vegetable garden (see Apple Farm lower band) with asparagus, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbages, eggplant, spinach, lettuce, corn and Brussels sprouts. His favorite vegetable was a bright red radish, the first sign of spring, which he ate sprinkled salt. A chain smoker, my father even tried to grow his own tobacco, however, he extended his life to 95 years by giving up the habit.

To make a “living” for our family of seven he grew trees: apple, pear, cherry, peach and plum, eventually settling exclusively on apples, as farming became more specialized and less of a cottage industry. All remaining pasturage was turned over to trees. The really rocky and hilly land was planted with evergreens and became our Christmas Tree Hill.

Apple Farm depicts many visual memories of farm life including images of winter (top), spring (middle) and full summer (bottom). Over all is a violent sky that I have come to realize represents the occasional terrifying wind in fall. One “Easterly” storm raged for three days straight blowing down our sheep barn, and we were thankful it was not our house. The next level is the Catskill Mountains, painted not like our benign old worn down mountains, but like the new jagged Wasatch Mountains in Utah. The next layer represents the “snow caves” my sister Louise and I used to carve out of the huge snowdrifts that built up in ravines. Towering over our heads, often 7 feet thick, we would tunnel into the drifts to make a “house.” Spring is represented by the soft mounds of apple trees in full blossom. The lower level is my father’s “Garden of Eden” in front of the farm pond. Muskrat houses constructed of reed mounds dot the pond, and the golden boughs of willow trees droop their branches over all in a protective maternal manner.

The Apple Farm was conceived and painted in 17 days, and immediately exhibited in a Long Island gallery. I painted it from memory and out of love of my childhood. After completing it, an artist friend pointed out to me that the images represent a troubling relationship to the land. My parents had just sold off the land surrounding their home for a “housing development”, an arrangement no one liked but were forced into for financial reasons. So the turmoil in the sky and the open mouthed “caves” are eating the land, and bearing down on the fecund and hard won harvest at the bottom (and smaller end) of the canvas. All my anxiety and unhappiness about the sale of our beloved orchards and gardens is summarized in this complex work of the heart.

The unusual shape of the canvas is influenced by paintings on Asian fans. Much of my artwork is influenced by Asian techniques, patterns and motifs. (See sections Scroll Prints, and Banners.) I made the wood supports for the shaped canvas myself and repeated the form for the Diary Farm painting. In the future I would like to return to this shape for landscape paintings, including one of the Mid–west plains and Rocky Mountains. Diary Farm is a sequel to Apple Farm. Because I am less familiar with dairy farms it was more difficult to plan and required much research in Columbia County. I had never painted any animal, much less a dairy cow, and I needed to take photos of cattle and dairy barns. Most of the barns pictured belong to farmers I knew as a child.

Again the seasons are represented: spring, summer and winter. Times of day are also represented with mid–day in the center and twilight fading to darkness at the sides. As a child my mother would quote the doggerel, “I hope to never see a purple cow, but I’d rather see than be one”, which is why had to have “purple cows” in my painting. My favorite section of the painting is at the bottom showing a lane of Maple trees in late winter. The sap buckets are pegged to the trees, just as they were used in our farm lanes when we collected sap for Maple syrup. One of my Dutch ancestors was Hogeboom, meaning “hedgerow.” Beyond, the cut corn stubble sticks out of the light snow.

The emotional agenda for Dairy Farm painting is not as wrenching for me as for the Apple Farm. Rather it represents the rolling fields and clustered homes and barns of my beloved Columbia County where my ancestors have lived for about 400 years, starting with the days of the Dutch Patroon land grants.

Floral Paintings: Acrylic Paint on Paper

My ancestors were farming Celts, settled Goths, goat and sheep herding Germanic tribes, and Low Land Dutch bulb growers. No wild nomadic horseman or Viking raiders sweeping out of the sea in my genes! That ancestry belongs to my husband with his Norman name, tall oarsman’s build and red/blond beard, a true Eric the Red. Although both my father and mother were raised as city kids in Chicago they spent their adulthood building an upstate New York apple farm out of the overgrazed, worn out soil of a dairy farm. My earliest visual memory of the 150 acres is a sweeping view across hill after hill with few trees in sight, a clear line to the Catskill Mountains. The Northeast had been over grazed and its forests cleared for ships’ masts and firewood for three centuries. The Northeast’s late 20th century “rural forest” is a recent phenomenon as farms are sold off for housing developments. The new homeowners want “privacy” and allow trees to grow.

Because of my agricultural genes and my rural upbringing I love to grow plants and flowers. The oldest tree I own is a gift from a former boyfriend, a Norfolk Pine that I have nursed and treasured for 40 years. Bob and I have planted gardens, shrubs and trees on every house plot we have owned. And one of my delights is to record these plants in artwork.

Oils, acrylics, etchings, drawn sketches, and banners all depict the plants that I own. Rarely do I paint a flower that I have not grown. Recent exceptions are the paintings of the flowers given in memory of my mother–in–law, Rose Neville. The roundel Blue Hydrangea is the most successful of these efforts, the flowers are life–like and the composition daring in its abstraction and lack of a realistic background. The horizontal sweep of flowers in borders is painted in Daisy and Hostas, and Black Eyed Susans. On occasion I return to the motifs of my childhood art teacher, Gertrude Tipple, an apple farmer’s wife, who would make compositions of vases of flowers with jewelry wound around the base. My mother bought one of these paintings and it was prominently displayed in our living room. Dogwood and Hydrangea is an example of this traditional subject.

Lately, I have begun incorporating imagery from Asia as background material for the flowers, as in the Chrysanthemum paintings. Morning Glory Vine and White Lilies take their unusual narrow vertical composition from their frames. My daughter called one morning to say that the British Art Museum at Yale was selling old frames very cheaply and I drove down from Boston to be first in line for the sale. Later, I planned artwork to fit the frame sizes, a favorite devise for my recent large floral paintings.

The floral paintings relate closely to the floral etchings. (See section, Floral Etchings.) In the past year I have begun to stretch the “floral” envelope and I am mid–way in a process of combining flowers and birds in large format (h. 4' x w. 3') oils. The idea is to make the works less naturalistic, more sensual and visionary. Four of these paintings were used as decoration for the wedding receptions of my two daughters and fulfilled my dreams of romantic, bold art that crosses the boundaries between “decoration” and “vision.”

Etchings and Monoprints

I learned Intaglio Etching process from Master Printer Donn Steward at the Huntington Township Art League studio on Long Island in the 1980’s. Donn was a renowned printer who had worked with many of the most famous New York painters of the 60’s and 70’s. He died of a sudden heart attack while pulling a print with a collaborator in New York City. Donn was an excellent teacher because he was a facilitator, always trying to help students solve problems and get the best results. Unlike many teachers he did not attempt to undermine a talented student’s work, and he treated all students, experienced and novice, alike. I had heard about his classes from other artist friends on the Island and finally decided to give it a try. I appeared one day and came in with my drawing for Creation, a fully realized drawing employing earth/air/sky/water images from nature. The sketch was based on a Wood Wall Sculpture, Creation, which I had recently completed. Without indicating that there was anything unusual about this, Donn got me a large plate and I proceeded to work for several weeks on it. The resulting print pleased me a great deal and I was hooked on etching. Only much later did Donn tell me that in all his years of working with artist–printmakers, from Motherwell to Frakenthauler, he had never had a student begin with a fully realized idea, without experimenting around first. It had never occurred to me to do anything else!

Always interested in depicting nature as a metaphor for human and divine creativity, I continued to work with images such as Great Wave and Air. One day during etching class, the radio announced that Mt. St. Helens was going to explode soon, and several weeks later it did, killing dozens of people and anything else in its path. The idea of a super–violent explosion struck me immediately as a startling metaphor for human violence and creativity. As soon as the Mt. St. Helen explosion took place I glued myself to the TV, memorizing the imagery. I gathered together every photo taken, watched the videos and began drawing the scene. The drawings were subsequently turned into etchings, paintings, and monotypes. (See sections Oil and Acrylic Paintings, and Drawings and Etchings.) From the idea of volcanic explosion came the image of the Caldera. It doesn’t take much visual imagination to read into both images the symbolism of male and female sexuality. As Woody Allen says, “It’s all about sex and death.” And so I believe it is. Both the Caldera’s oval void and spewing volcano obviously represent sex, but they are also symbolize galaxies, cosmic voids, extinctions, black holes, and death. They are potent symbols of both fecundity and annihilation. The symbols are so rich that I continue to work with them to the present day. In fact, the etchings about Mt. St. Helens triggered in me an “explosion” of creativity and novel image making that led to Eternal Recurrence of the Same (h. 5 feet by w.70 feet) and Caves to Cosmos (h. 5 feet x w. 49 feet.)

Other etchings are the result of personal interests, such as Sloop Sailing the Hudson River. It depicts the Eleanor, a 36 foot long historic wooden boat, owned and sailed by my father for many years on the river. The Rip Van Winkle Bridge at Catskill, Frederick Church’s home “Olana”, and the historic Hudson-Athens Lighthouse are all included in this non–perspectival image of river sailing.

Two of my favorite prints are Eve and Adam and Eve, (not pictured,) both done in response to a request for an exhibition of nude art at the Katonah Gallery, New York. The concept of using Asian dragon imagery along with the caldera, volcano, rocks and waves images intrigued me. The two archetypal male/female figures are set in a hostile world of primal images. Adam and Eve as lovers kneeling beside a waterfall, surrounded by the demons of desire and lust is as powerful an image, in my opinion, as Albrecht Dürer’s dumpy Northern German folk. Another favorite print is my Adam and Eve after Albrecht Dürer. This was an exciting print to make because Donn Steward helped me etch the actually wood grain from a real roundel of wood onto the plate. He also assisted in the cutting of the metal by the use of acid, not a cutting tool, in order to make the half circles. These are the only prints I have made using the human figure, and I would like to have the opportunity to explore the nude further. I would probably begin with drawings of myself done many years ago when I was expecting our first child. No doubt too x–rated for the Internet!

Etching prints are made in a process used by Rembrandt with a long historical tradition. A metal plate, often copper or zinc, is covered with a soft wax ground. The artist uses a very sharp metal tool with a needle like point to scratch marks into the wax making the desired image. The metal plate is then placed in an acid bath which “eats” down into the metal wherever the wax has been scrapped away, leaving lines etched into the plate. Next all wax is removed and the plate cleaned. Oily inks, usually black, are rubbed onto the plate filling the etched lines. Access ink is gentle wiped off the flat surface. In the printing process, heavy water soaked paper is placed over the plate that rests on the flat bed of a printing press. The plate, paper and pad are rolled through the press and the ink is “pulled” out of the indented lines, forming an image. In a genuine intaglio print has a three–dimensional quality: the ink lines are raised up from the paper, and the indentations of the metal into the paper are visible at the four sides. In modern etching, colored inks and papers are used in a surprising variety of innovative techniques.

Drawings and Etchings

My first commission at age 15 was from a neighbor who was the editor of Theatre Arts Magazine. He wanted a drawing of a fir tree for his holiday greeting cards and I was paid $15. which was a large sum of money at the time. (Looking back, I think there may have been some charity in the payment.) Today very little respect is given by the public to drawing and it is practically impossible to sell them. The technique seems “old fashioned” and people want “color” and ephemeral abstractions. Drawings are just too specific for the modern eye, but that hasn’t stopped me from drawing!

My strongest memories of grade school, Claverack Union Free School, are about art projects. It was obvious to my teachers that I liked art and could draw. How puzzled I was when my first grade teacher said my Christmas tree drawing was “wrong, because it has black ornaments, and that isn’t right.” (Every year our tree is decorated with my daughter Naomi’s painted black ornaments that she made at age three.) How embarrassed in third grade when the teacher told the other students that their colored checked patterns were “wrong” and my strong blue and red pattern was “right.” How odd it was to have the classroom windows decorated at Easter time with identical paper cut tulips made by all of us in the class except the two students who couldn’t “follow directions.” How baffling in 4th grade to try to draw a picture of children at a carnival and realize that my “balloon” people didn’t have waists and that no one could help me solve the problem.

Or how in strange in 5th grade to have my teacher keep my drawing of the Indian camp for herself. (She kept it for almost 40 years!) How humiliating in 6th grade to have the “new” boy in class be able to draw as well as I could. (Maybe even better!) And in 7th grade, how gratifying that my cardboard box model about Indian Summer received an honors grade. How disappointing to receive a “second prize” in an 8th grade art contest, behind a boy whose mother was an artist who had better paints than I did. All the other memories tend to fade, but these stand out.

At Smith College my most important drawing teacher was Leonard Baskin. He trained students to draw directly from life using only a Crow Quill pen and black India Ink, a most unforgiving medium allowing no mistakes. Neither was any preliminary drawing permitted. I loved the advance planning, the concentration, the endless hours of intense examination of an object, and the fact that I was good at it. My equally talented roommate was driven wild by the assignment, as she was by nature a painter.

I inherited my drawing ability from my father, the apple farmer. We have only three drawings that he did in his lifetime that I know of: a Bantam rooster, Bash Bish Falls, and a cherry tree. They are all realistic, rather Asian in their attention to detail and fine pencil line, and they are all family treasures.

The drawings on my web site reflect my interest in the violent displays of nature, exploding volcanoes, calderas, ash plumes, and the Spiral Jetty in flames. However, other drawings of mine use water, waves, and air as imagery. I have also made drawings of myself when pregnant, portrait drawings, drawings of trees, flowers, houses, barns, and daily objects. Conte crayon, Crayola crayons, or charcoal pencils all make wonderful lines. On some drawing I combine several media together.

The Collages on my web site are made by cutting up the paper “proofs” from my intaglio etchings. Many proofs are required before a plate is completed, and each represents a slightly different version of the print. During the etching process it occurred to me that, cut into strips and wedges, the black and white images made lively patterns when assembled together. I consider them to be among my most successful works. Production of these collages is very limited because once a plate is complete, no more proofs are required.

Floral Etchings

I have a love/hate relation with flowers. I love to look at them, but from earliest childhood they made me sneeze and weeze with allergies. Golden Rod, growing wild under the apple trees on my parents’ farm, was a favorite with its arcing stems and yellow cascades of fine florets. But it was banished from my second grade classroom by Miss Griffen because it made us all watery eyed.

As a child my “job” was to pick the wild flowers growing everywhere and make “arrangements” of them in vases for my mother who was delighted with the bouquets. My parents were so busy raising apples, goats, geese and children that they did not have time either time or money for cultivated flowers. Easy–to–grow flowers such as “Yellow Rose of China”, peonies, iris, lilacs and naturalized day lilies could survive the 15 below zero winters and hot, dry summers. All other “flowers” were grown to produce something edible; apples, pears, peaches, plums, sweet and sour cherries, quince, grapes, gooseberries, strawberries, currents, and elderberries. But wild flowers were abundant. As soon as spring brought up the first wild columbine or violet on Christmas Tree Hill, until the last autumn wild aster, flowers were everywhere. I quickly learned which ones would last in a vase of water, (not dandelions) and what was needed to harvest them, (a scissors or a knife,) where I would catch poison ivy (in the wild aster patch) and where I would get my feet wet, (the day lily bed by the dirt road).

As a sophomore at Smith College I took a Horticulture class with Mr. Campbell, director of Lyman green house. One class was in “flower arranging” for which he purchased flowers. What a treat for me! I plunged in and did a “farm arrangement” and it was successful. When I looked around me I saw to my astonishment that other students were struggling away, jamming flowers in vases any which way, or just fiddling with them unable to make an arrangement. “What’s wrong?” I wondered. “Everyone knows how to arrange flowers, it’s just like breathing.” Suddenly it came to me; not everyone had been brought up in the Garden of Eden. (See section Apple Farm and Dairy Farm.)

Do I need to say more about my background for the floral etchings? The easiest thing in the world is to “arrange” and draw flowers on an etching plate. My most successful and sure floral images come when I take the metal plate outdoors into my gardens and draw directly into the warm wax with a stylus. Blue Bells and Snow Peas, Morning Glory Vine series, Day Lily, French Lily Tulips, etc. were all drawn in this manner from flowers I grew myself. (For explanation see the section Etching, Intaglio.)

My etching teacher, Donn Steward, helped me work out the intricate inking and Chine collé printing processes. The prints, made on Dutch etching paper, some hand tinted with acrylic paint washes, are the most successful works I have made (from a sales standpoint). I hope everyone loves these floral works as much as I do.

Scrolls, Collage, Mixed Media

The scrolls celebrate the beauty, complexity and symbolism of new scientific cosmological discoveries. Stunning images of the Structure of the Universe, the Gamma Rays of the Milky Way, Super Nova, and the Flow of the River of the Universe have inspired me to produce drawings, paintings and collages. The addition of the symbol language of mathematics adds to the Scroll’s complexity. The production of scrolls is an outgrowth of my preliminary work for large paintings. Caves to Cosmos, (h. 5 feet x w. 49 feet) and Eternal Recurrence of the Same, (h. 5 feet by w. 70 feet) are based on my precisely thought out and drafted plans. I can not imagine undertaking a painting 70 feet long without having a careful plan. The preliminary drawings, usually ink on paper, have a beauty of their own, quite independent of the final paintings. I was trained by Leonard Basking at Smith College to render the exact image of a seashell or a skull in Crow quill pen, with no erasures. This precise technical training has helped me depict a wide variety of subjects including scientific diagrams. For the scrolls, my preliminary drawings were about 12" by 16" and ranged from images of the Milky Way to the Garden of Eden. Other images included monsters in prehistoric caves, rose gardens, supernova and galactic clouds of gases. After completing the drawings I intended to have them reproduced for my records, so I took them to a photo copy shop and asked for five copies each. As they came off the Xerox machine and lay fanned out on the counter I was stunned by the complexity of what I saw and the dynamic way the multiples created new visual combinations. I raced back to my studio and began cutting, tearing, pasting and recombining the photocopied images. Then I took these “combines” back to the photo shop and had them reproduced. At that time the copying machine could make “reversals” of images, printing the drawings in white line on black backgrounds. This added to the variety of effects I could produce and many of the images, Tripartite Earth, and Structure of the Universe, for example, resulted. The process was exhilarating. Finally I had created about 50 feet of collaged paper. The next step was to take the collage to a Kinko’s shop that had an aptly named machine called a “Mr. Big.” A young woman worked with me and we ran the collage, cut up into four-foot lengths, through “Mr. Big.” Soon the shop floor was covered in long lengths of the Caves to Cosmos scroll. Back in my studio I pasted the sections together to make a continuous roll or “scroll” and mounted it with wooden rods at each end.

Next, mathematical equations entered the make up of the scroll as a result of a conversation with Professor Richard “Dick” Beals, head of the Yale mathematics department and a world class mathematician. (I introduced Dick to his future wife, Nancy, in 1961, and he introduced me to my husband, Robert, in 1962.) As he looked at the scroll we mutually came up with the idea that it would greatly enrich the symbolism if equations of historic significance were added. On its most fundamental level the painting, Caves to Cosmos, is about the history of human creativity. Therefore, the addition of historic math equations is most appropriate for the scrolls. (See section Caves to Cosmos, painting.) After working on the idea for several weeks, Dick came back up to Boston from New Haven and added the math in his own handwriting along the lower edge of the scroll. He signed it at the end, along with my signature. To my way of thinking the math is a significant symbolic enhancement and an integral part of the Caves to Cosmos scroll.

A further development of the collaged images of Caves to Cosmos was the production of three vertical, hanging scrolls. These are also influenced by Asian art forms, with which they share a common subject matter: landscapes. For these works I began with the first collage which is rougher in texture, pasted together with thick glue, black paper and multiple layers of paper. To enhance the collage/drawing I applied glued glitter and worked over the images with gold paint lines applied with a thin brush. The gold, added to the black linear drawings, gives them an eerie reflective glow. The scrolls are hung on wood rods. I would like to explore all of these scroll techniques further. The images that are being developed from cosmological research are fascinating in their complexity and symbolism and I intend to use mathematical equations, repeating them to create new visual patterns.

Oklahoma is a scroll, produced in the manner described above, whose topic is the tragic events of the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing. The images are based on my drawings done on the morning of the bombing while watching the television screen and on later newspaper photographs. It is accompanied by a poem written by my husband, Robert C. Neville. (No picture)

Banners (hand stitched cloth)

My first sewing project, age 7, was a hand–stitched apron made out of a cloth sack for sheep feed. Sewn with a straight running stitch, the apron was a 4–H project. My Mom organized the 4–H club and my father raised the sheep. Learning to thread the needle and tie a knot were the hardest parts of project, and it won a blue ribbon at the Columbia County Agricultural Fair. Since then I’ve sewn my own clothes all my life including among other garments a white evening gown for Hudson High School prom, my wedding dress, my husband’s Ph.D. academic gown, our babies’ dresses and the metallic gold embroidery jacket I intend to be buried in. Sewing clothes results in scraps of cloth, each a precious remembrance of good times or bad. And with these thousands of left over scraps I construct banners. The pieces of cloth are cut and arranged in a pleasing pattern, then hand stitched onto a stiff backing. The banner is hung on a wall by a rod. Some women quilt with scrap cloth; however, I’m too creative for the repetitive process of quilt making, maybe a “crazy quilt” but never just “squares.”

The soothing process of a fine needle going in and out of delicate fabric, or the struggle to penetrate a thick layer of men’s wool suit fabric, occupies me in evening hours when a “sit down” project by the fire is called for. Sometimes I stitch while academic visitors talk philosophy or theology with my husband, and the conversation is too obscure to interest me, or I’ve had too much wine to drink to be able to attend to a guest who has stayed too late. And I always think, “I’d better save all my cloth so I’ll have something to do in my “old age”, arthritic hands pushing the needle in and out while future grandchildren toddle about.” Well, it’s a dream.

Ideas for cloth banner design depend on my other art explorations. In the 1970’s and 80’s, when I was working with modernist shaped canvas constructions, the cloth designs, Blue, White, Red, and Black, White, Red, were crisp and spare. Bold lines and shapes, and strong flat colors are divided into large geometric squares. Alternating stripes or large abstract shapes define the spaces.

Titled banners, designed with the Neville name, or the Katonah Gallery in Mt Kisco, NY (now the Katonah Museum) presented opportunities to work with letters as abstract shapes. Commissions for banner design are tailored to the interests and locations of the purchasers. The Goldman Banner, made for a college friend, features small squares of ocean and landscape of the Palos Verdes Estates where she lives.

More recent banners are ethnically based, some with Japanese or Korean cloth which we purchase on trips to those countries. African Banners employ the motifs of African sculpture and textile patterns. Weddings are occasions to explore the wonders of white cloth, embroidery, satin, lace and the subtlety of White on White.

My newest Horton/Egan Banner will take me back to the farm where I was brought up. Since the recent death of my parents, their possessions have been dispersed. Antique linens dating from1860s to the present, Damask table cloths, crocheted arm rest covers, huge linen table napkins, lace doilies, embroidered handkerchiefs and dish towels are part of the fabric treasure trove. Some pieces have been restored for current use, but many are too worn, too fragile, or are merely remnants. These family heirlooms will be visually woven into an intricate geometric pattern, ready to be hung on a wall for future generations to marvel over women’s art. Maybe I’ll even find a scrap of my old feed-sack cloth to add to the Horton/Egan Banner.

Photomontage and Wood Wall Sculptures

(Photomontages are not pictured on my Web Site)

Although my parents were farmers, they were also intellectuals. My father avidly studied history. He read the New York Harold Tribune every morning and followed World War II news nightly on the radio. He and my mother had their worst arguments over politics and elections. My father cried when the Governor of New York State, Thomas E. Dewey lost the election to Harry S. Truman. At age 11, I thought the end of the world had come; at least it seemed that way for a Republican upstate family. One the greatest thrills of my mother’s life was meeting Eleanor Roosevelt in Hudson and earlier listening to Frank Lloyd Wright lecture at Northwestern University in Illinois. Throughout their adult lives they were civic leaders running organizations as diverse as the Mellenville Grange, the Masonic Lodge, the Claverack Garden Club and the League of Women Voters. So I inherited my “social justice” and “history in the making” art interests directly from my parents. The subject matter for my photomontages follows from these interests.

Photomontages were my creative passion for 16 years from1964 to 1980. In the 60’s and 70’s issues of social justice, civil rights, population control, environmental degradation, women’s rights and many others were of vital concern for our nation and me. As a young wife and mother I was location–bound and couldn’t “march”, but I did my bit to influence public opinion with large 4' by 4' and 4' by 6' photomontages on these issues. Employing news photos mainly from Life magazine I recombined them in complex new ways to stress my liberal viewpoint. They were strikingly beautiful. The works were exhibited widely in New York City, won awards and were purchased by concerned individuals. Many members of the Hastings Institute think–tank were among the purchasers.

The Vietnam War and civil rights movements were the defining issues of the day.

The Vietnam War caused such social upheaval that we are still healing its wounds to this day. My late brother–in–law, James Neville, served in Vietnam and this further galvanized me to work on this issue, with both photomontages and wood sculptures. At the height of the student rebellions against the War, I was teaching at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus, in its inaugural year. Some of my students were Vietnam War vets, wounded and out of action. It was a wild and turbulent year with perpetual student cries “Strike, strike today, they’ve bombed hill number 327!” and all classes would be cancelled. My husband was teaching Philosophy at Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus where the Student Center was partially burned by agitators. And during the turmoil I gave birth to our daughter, a happy event for us.

Civil rights was the other burning issue I address in photomontages. I was influenced by the writings of James Baldwin whose books were receiving public attention as well as general press coverage. I had been brought up in Columbia County, a community that included “Negroes” many of whom had names like “VanAllstyne”, a Dutch Patroon name going back 400 years. They were my grade school classmates. At Hudson High School the co–editor of the Owl newspaper was a black girl. All of us were aware of the poverty that many of our classmates of color endured living on the Columbia street the “poor” side of Hudson, but the differences were ones of “class” not of “race.” However, I was as naive as anyone about the effects of cultural racism in the north and outright segregation in the south and civil rights became one of the main topics for my photomontages. My montage of the funeral cortege for Dr. Martin Luther King was completed within a day of the news photos appearing in the major magazines. The Boston University School of Theology, where Dr. King received his degrees, owns the work.

Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969 and we watched his first step on live TV in the middle of the night. We woke our daughter, Naomi, who was 15 months old out of her deep sleep pried her eyes open so she would be able to say as an adult, “I saw the first man step on the moon.” This event and the excitement over space exploration fascinated me and I began photomontages on these topics. When US astronauts Grissom, Chaffee and White were burned alive in the tragic capsule fire, I immediately began a montage on the event. All these disturbing cultural changes and events seemed to demand a personal emotional response; mine, as an artist, was to create artwork. Photomontage is an exacting craft; not just a random hodgepodge of photo clippings careless glued together. I learned the basic techniques of cut–tear–paste photomontage in 1964 from John Fitzgerald, a fellow art teacher in Greenwich, CT. He had just returned from taking a course at Immaculate Heart College in California, where Sister Mary Corita and Sister Mary Magdalene taught their innovative art techniques. I began rather tentatively with a small work using their theories, but by my second photomontage I had transformed the process to make the art much bigger, less romantic, less abstract, and more oriented toward social issues.

Because the Life photos published each week were so spectacular and the coverage of major events so immediate, it was possible to produce significant art statements on a social event almost immediately. I became so expert at organizing and pasting the photos up that I could produce a 4' by 6' artwork in several weeks time, or less. The size always depended on the 4 x 6 foot dimensions of our dinning room table, which Bob had made when we were first married. It was a piece of plywood supported by 4" x 4" legs. After dining I would get the dishes off the table, then spread my large sheets of white paper out to continue artwork. When we moved into our Yonkers mansion from our small Bronx apartment I finally had a table in the basement studio large enough that I no longer had to work where we ate. But I was committed to 4' x 6' and have used it ever since as a module for paintings. It is a comfortable size. (The table has just been “decommissioned” after 40 years use for eating and working. It is filled with electric drillholes, paint spatters and mat knife scratches and we’ve served many sumptuous banquets on it.)

In 1980 my art took a radical new turn and I trained myself in a new media and explored a new iconography. I had come to realize the inherent difficulties with both photomontage and wood wall sculptures and I was forced to give up the media. The number one problem was copyright of the photographs. I had purchased the magazines and therefore owned the paper and what was printed on it. I could use it for toilet paper or I could glue it to other photos I owned to make a new work of art. But I came to believe that I could not reproduce the resulting image. This is a severe limitation for all contemporary artwork that uses photography, in spite of its long and honorable use by artists going back to Picasso and Juan Gris. In addition, the photographs were printed on cheap pulp paper and faded badly. At a dinner party of a friend who had purchased my photomontage, I was horrified to see how badly it had faded. All my careful joinings of similar colors were destroyed, everything fading to grays. Potential buyers would ask me, “How long will it last?” and I was forced to admit, “Not long.” So after 16 years I came to the decision that I had to give up the media. I had developed an original, forceful medium, packed with symbolic meaning and capable of changing people’s perceptions of themselves and society. It was a hard decision, but I had to move on.

Therefore, I decided to return to time tested, durable material and planned a series of paintings using a medium I was unfamiliar with: acrylic paint on canvas. (For that story see the section on Oil and Acrylic Paintings.) I continue to work with acrylic paint today. But the decision also changed the “subject matter” of my art. I was not about to try to recreate news photos with paint, and therefore searched for a new subject matter. I had come to realize that my “social issues” art was tied to specific historic times, places and to American culture. Now I wanted to make art that would have a timeless and less culturally specific content, something universally understood on any continent. Thus came about Earth, Air, Fire, Water and eventually Eternal Recurrence of the Same and Caves to Cosmos. My art production took a new turn and I trained myself in a new medium with a new symbol system.