Monteverde
Hotel Belmar Artist Residency: Patrick Neal
Final Exhibition November 4th, 2022
Installation in Progress at Hotel Belmar
www.instagram.com/reel/Ckj5eoiuiMl/?igs…
As a painter, I work among the genres of still life, landscape and portraiture. In all three cases, I have never been interested in narratives or storylines. The impetus or triggers that set a work in motion has to do with perceptual phenomena. Things like tactile props including glass vases, textiles, artificial flowers, and recyclable materials including construction paper and mesh netting. Or, the unique physical characteristics of a room, forest or person.
I write about art, and tend to get interested in the work and lives of other artists, often incorporating likenesses of their work into my own compositions. I do research that leads to all manner of disjointed art historical topics. As a result of these tendencies, with an emphasis on ephemera, incident and sensory phenomena, I've come to think of my paintings to be structured like poems, layered with associations and divergent themes. I'm ultimately drawn to the sensual and impressionistic qualities of earthbound, physical experiences.
I've always wanted to work in the context of a hotel setting. An unfamiliar environment stocked with visual surprises and unlimited subject matter. A situation that brings together person, place and thing and is rife with creative potential. My residency at the Hotel Belmar has been a marriage made in heaven in this sense. Three weeks of uninterrupted studio time in the Monteverde cloud forest setting with its unparalleled beauty. The subjects of the works I have made here are drawn form the grounds of the hotel including the pond, forest and gardens. Staff and residents at work in the restaurant and farm, and myself enjoying the confines of my room. I've also painted still lives showcasing flowers, wood, utensils, tiles and plants collected from the environs of the hotel. In all cases I was drawn to things unexpected and visually interesting. Real life phenomena with specific details and abstract undercurrents.
The associative quality of how outside terrain mingled with indoor domesticity, made it easy to move between various subject matter. Working among the dissolvable borders of climate, lighting, public and private, one piece easily fed into the next. Many paintings began with preliminary drawings and photos that provided an initial structure or entry point. But in all cases, I accentuate the interplay between abstraction and representation, and the tactile process of the making of a piece itself.
One of my favorite pieces done in residence is title, "Mountains and Cloud Forest". In typical fashion, this horizontal watercolor spun off of a vertical composition of similar subject that included a view from the balcony of my studio. The difference here though is an emphasis on the entirety of the landscape of trees, sky and mountain within my immediate field of vision. The work is representational but not realist, and highlights the distinct shapes and textures of various vegetation as they appear side by side across the plane of my paper. And, from foreground to background moving through deep space that stretches miles to the sea and mountains far away. At first glance the work resembles a tapestry done in a patchwork of strokes and colors, but it is also an accurate depiction of the grounds and site of the Hotel Belmar.
Patrick Neal
Artist Residency
November 2022