Cacti, 2025
Patrick Neal’s watercolor paintings are lush, brightly colored and teeming with life. His still life and landscape arrangements are drawn from studio props and flora and fauna common to recreational parks and gardens. Motifs of sunflowers, cotton, koi and cacti are viewed from an overhead, bird’s eye view and the picture plane is activated with edge-to-edge surface activity. Working from direct observation en plein air as well as from a trove of iPhone snapshots, Neal gathers his subjects in an impressionistic manner, focusing on moments that belie distinctions between representation and abstraction. He is drawn to the sensual qualities of his subjects—how they look, feel, smell and sound—and their physical and material equivalencies when reinterpreted two-dimensionally as paint on paper. The hovering perspective suggests a bodily experience in the act of discovering everyday sights and encounters as they come to life, and reveal themselves.
Patrick Neal holds an MFA from Yale University and attended Yale Norfolk School of Art, the New York Studio School, and Skowhegan. He is a 2018 NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting and received the Queens Art Fund New Work Grant. Neal is a co-host of Show & Tell, a lecture series at the New York Irish Center in Queens, and his work has been exhibited throughout New York for nearly three decades.