Color and Searching with Artist Neil Callander

Neil Callander is an artist and an educator. Born in Louisville KY, Neil earned a BFA from Indiana University (2003) and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (2006). In 2005 he received a full fellowship to be a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. After graduate school Neil worked as a painter for the artist Jeff Koons in his New York studio.

In 2007 Neil and family left New York City to pursue careers as artists and academics. This decision has offered a tour of the South with time spent in Louisville KY, Starkville MS, and Tuscaloosa AL. Neil and his wife Adrienne are currently professors of Art at the University of Arkansas and live in a household of makers, dogs, and sheep on three acres in Fayetteville AR.

Neil has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at Goose Barnacle (Brooklyn NY), Studio Break Gallery (West Chicago IL), Bowling Green State University (OH), MANIFEST Gallery and Drawing Center (Cincinnati OH), Elon University (NC) and The Kentucky School of Art (Louisville). Group exhibitions include MANIFEST Gallery and Drawing Center (Cincinnati OH), The Huntsville Museum of Art (AL), The Mississippi Museum of Art (Jackson), The New Gallery of Modern Art (Charlotte NC), First Street Gallery (NYC), Washington Art Association (CT) and many others. He has presented on his work and practice at institutes of higher learning including Boston University, UMass Dartmouth, Arkansas State University, and the University of Mississippi. He is a member of ZEUXIS (an association of still life painters based in NYC), and SECAC whose conferences he regularly attends.

Recent creative endeavors include participation in Art Week (July 2022) at the fabled family home of painter Fairfield Porter on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. Neil returned to the island in 2024 and will again in 2025 to facilitate a painting retreat he developed.

"Cinema is the king of story-telling. Photography is a much more efficient form of documentation. Music is superior at catharsis. Television and the Internet own propaganda. That leaves painting the domains of materiality and ambiguity. I pack a painting with cultural and personal references and work toward an image that is provocative yet conceptually flexible. As more is added the compositions grow thicker, tighter, and more refined over time – like the tangle of a garden in late summer. The act of viewing my paintings is an unlocking of these internal relationships. Experiencing dense paintings that slowly reveal their nature can help us contend with the pervasiveness of fast-talking, slick images. In a media-riddled world, painting is a stabilizing force."

LINKS:

neilcallander.com