Interview

AUDER: That’s what I appreciate in the work. There are also details where your skill as a painter starts to come in. Like, the yellow of that egg is fully developed as a painting on its own. If you wanted to paint some eggs on a plate in 18th-century still life–style, I have little doubt you could probably do that. But there’s that violence that becomes the painting. Like, shit is happening in your head.

NEEL: It’s weird, I think so much of that goes back to living in the city. It’s such a violent place, right? But the violence in New York feels really mundane and banal to me. Whereas in the privacy of one’s own home, say, like the farm I grew up on in Vermont, the kinds of things that can happen seem much more extreme. Maybe because it’s more personal. Or maybe because you block out the things that happen in the city. But it’s like seeing things born, live, die, fall apart, and start over again, without any intermediary clean-up steps from some corporate organization. Even though I don’t have any larger spiritual or ideological system, there is some logic in concert with a huge number of beautiful, disconcerting, screwed-up variables that results in a certain visual pleasure in violent things. Like a broken egg yolk can be the most violent thing I’ve seen all day, if I’m in the right mood. But also tons of trash in the woods or a burned-up trailer park can also come across as especially violent.

AUDER: Or just daily life, when you look at the images that are served to us around the world.

NEEL: Like everything that you can touch that isn’t yours.

AUDER: It’s funny, looking at your painting. The violence really isn’t in the egg, it’s in the paint—the way the paint is applied next to the egg.

NEEL: That happens sometimes with paint.

AUDER: Did you always do painting, or did you ever try another medium?

NEEL: Actually I stopped and made videos and digital photographs for a while. I was getting frustrated with painting because everyone was making paintings from opaque projections, like Luc Tuymans and Gerhard Richter. When those guys do it, it’s great. When art students do it, it isn’t so. It was a real fad. I figured I’d make work related to source material that I was interested in—images I found on the Internet. But then I realized that the transcription from photograph to wall had to be filled in by me. Otherwise, the piece becomes a second-rate version of the original source. Like, you love a thing and take a picture of it, but it may not hold any of the qualities of that original thing you loved. It’s like when you see a sunset outside, you say, “Holy shit,” and take a picture of it with your camera. There’s none of the feeling left.

AUDER: Yeah. And the space is all different.

NEEL: That’s where the painting comes into play. Painting was the way I could resist turning something into a second-rate version.

AUDER: When I look around your studio and see all of the tools and jars, it’s a very classical painting studio. But you get a real kick out of painting, don’t you?

NEEL: Well, it’s hard to do. Not just with the weight of art history and contemporary discourse. But it’s actually technically very difficult to achieve. I guess growing up around my grandmother—Alice’s way of applying paint in this fresh manner, but having these oscillating moments of incredible virtuosic realism—was totally inspiring. Because it was free and easy, but incredibly complex all at the same time. To me, the way she painted always seemed connected to living, more than just an exercise.

AUDER: Obviously, as a child you saw a way of creating, and that became part of survival. It’s almost as if without knowing it, you’re using the same tools. You’re painting without specifically referring to your grandmother’s style, but it’s the same tools, same colors, same bottles of paint. They mix together differently and become their own strokes. They are your own. But it’s fascinating that you’ve followed her path.

NEEL: Yeah, it becomes part of your subconscious, I think. When you see something every day, it gets into your brain. For me, it feels really good because I never know what Alice would have thought or said . . .

AUDER: Thank god! We don’t need Alice to come over and start telling you what to do . . . On the other hand, it wouldn’t matter if she liked it or not.

NEEL: No. It was perfect because she was approving when I was a child and nonexistent when I was an adult. So now my relationship with her is through what she left behind.

AUDER: To have the strength to keep painting, even though everyone’s always going to make that comparison, is very refreshing.

NEEL: But you knew Alice, so you know why that is. I don’t think a comparison is possible. Her situation was so weird and unique. It’s not like being related to some macho megastar where their shadow is cast so wide and long there’s no way you could ever possibly get a breath in that space.

AUDER: You’re absolutely clear that you’re a painter. It doesn’t matter who your grandmother was. You got some information from her at just the right time. It runs in the family but there doesn’t seem to be any baggage.