Alice Neel

According to a video recording of an interview with New York magazine I was lucky enough to find Alice Neel felt that she could have been a great psychologist but she decided she could do the same thing with her paintings. And when she heard a male artist saying that he loved to paint people who had grown old naturally in the country side, she laughed and said “I like to paint people who have been ripped to shreds by the ratrace of the city.” Awesome lady!

I was originally drawn to her work on a purely aesthetic level and the fact that some of her later work was sparse and raw, reminding me of F. Bacon. Upon finding out that she was an outspoken, highly confident, feminist I was drawn towards her work on a separate level. She was making this work during a time when people were running from fad to fad and she stayed the course. She found the work that fulfilled her, portraiture with a stripped down sensibility and blotchy color work, and she didn’t let the art world scare her into changing.

I like the pain that can be seen in the people she paints as well as the technique she uses. It is the pain of a long life, or the pain of a life that is sure to be short. It is a hidden pain that she can see, just like the psychiatrist she mentions in the interview I quoted. It’s in the hard edges of her technique, and the sparseness of the paint used to show a shirtless used up one time legend. There is something in those paint strokes I can find and use for myself. Currently the hunt is on for a full length documentary that apparently used to be on Netflix and no longer exists anywhere that I have looked. In her later years she gave very blunt, unapologetic interviews, and I want to hear more.