Islands Allagash, Neil Welliver, 1990

Woodcut 31 ¼ x 32 ½ in. (79.37 x 82.55 cm)

Neil Welliver（American, 1929-2005）

Night Scene   1982  Woodcut    via    more

Daily Painting [Summer Bathers Edition]

Neil Welliver TWO NUDES (TWICE) (1970)

Neil Welliver, “Last Sun and Snow”,1996

Any Canadian geese?

Neil Welliver (1929-2005), Canada Geese, 1978

Roy Martell Mason (1886-1972), Canada Geese Resting, watercolor on paper

Lynn Bogue Hunt (1878-1960)

Neil Welliver (1929-2005) - Birches, 2005.

Illusory Flowage - Neil Welliver

Art Weekend - Stump by Neil Welliver

In order to gather inspiration for his large-scale traditional American landscapes, Neil Welliver often went on forest treks to work on plein air paintings. Many of his landscapes were woodblock prints, where each layer is individually carved and printed until the full image is formed. Stump is composed of twenty-seven seperate colors, requiring the same amount of wood blocks.

Currently at Alexandre Gallery in NYC are Neil Welliver’s gorgeous paintings and works on paper, spanning his career from the late 1960s-2000 and including his last woodcut print, Stump.

From the gallery’s website–

In his 2005 New York Times obituary, Ken Johnson wrote:

Mr. Welliver came of age as an artist in the late 1950’s and 60’s, at a time when nonrepresentational styles of painting like Abstract Expressionism and, later, Color Field and Minimalism were accorded the highest critical prestige. Along with artists like Larry Rivers, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein, Mr. Welliver strove to paint representational images without sacrificing the formal innovations that the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had introduced to modern painting.

Welliver’s lifelong friend, the American poet Mark Strand, wrote of his process in 2001:

What sets Welliver’s woods apart from the woods of others is that they are, of course, his. We see them and know instantly who painted them. That stream plunging and swirling around those gray rocks is familiar, so are those clouds parading in ragged order across that sky spreading a midday blue over those hills. They are all part of Welliver’s woods. The unaffectedness, the ease with which they are simply there, without a hint of what went into their making, without an indication anywhere of the turmoil that prompted them, is what sets them apart. Of course, we can see the many brush strokes in a large Welliver and believe that they—in their tireless application—tell us what goes into a Welliver, but we would be wrong, for there is much in a Welliver that we cannot see. In the past of each one are the long hikes into the woods, which Welliver takes, loaded down with easel, canvas, brushes, oil, thinner, and tubes of color, to the spot where he will paint; then there are the hours he stands, in all kinds of weather, and paints what will be the small preparatory paintings on which he bases the large drawings that lead finally to the large paintings.

This exhibition closes 2/25/23.

Osprey's Nest -- Neil Welliver

Osprey’s Nest — Neil Welliver

Osprey’s Nest, 1980 by Neil Welliver (1929-2005)

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(via Study for Low Water - Knight's Flowage, 1980 - Neil Welliver)

Neil G. Welliver (American 1929-2005), Silver Brook, 1986, Oil on canvas

Neil Welliver（American, 1929-2005）

Islands Allagash  1990  Color woodcut    via    more

Skeletons Party - Neil G Welliver

Dancing with death, Neil Welliver (Skeletons Party)

Neil Welliver (American, 1929-2005) is best known for his large-scale, vivid paintings and woodcuts of the remote Maine wilderness. Born in the small town of Millville, Pennsylvania, he first studied at the Philadelphia College of Art (1953), followed by Yale (1955), where Josef Albers and Burgoyne Diller were among his teachers. Their influence, as well as the rising popularity of Abstract Expressionism, is evident from Welliver’s early experimentations in abstraction, which include elements of color field painting, as well as the color theory of Albers, and the flattened, “allover” space of Pollock and de Kooning.

Welliver would go on to teach at Yale from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, by which time he had moved formally towards the representational, beginning to paint the landscape of Maine. In the late 1960s and early 70s he also produced scenes of nude bathers in streams, their bodies abstracted by the moving water. While continuing to work as the chair of the University of Pennsylvania graduate school (1966-1989), he moved permanently to Lincolnville, Maine, in 1970. Welliver lost his studio, home, and much of his work to a fire in 1975. The following year, his second wife and infant daughter died. Further tragedy came with the death of his college aged son in 1991. His artistic practice remained the mode through which he survived these hardships.