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My work is evolving out of many starting points, and it could be seen as autobiographical, in that it is a response to the experiences I have had so far .I am searching for a visual language which provides a vehicle, in paint, to relay but not to illustrate, these experiences. I want to make paintings which relate to a sense of place, my home and family, and the music and films I enjoy. Each time I paint, I try to create fresh images with their own sense of identity.
The poet Idris Davies was a primary influence, he certainly pointed the way early on. The line "the spirit fired, and the calm disturbed" comes from his poem Gwalia Deserta, and for me, it relates to the idea of seeing afresh, aquiring a voice, a medium, to be able to say something, to respond and to put your skills to use.I took from Idris Davies the confidence to focus on what really matters to me.
Music has a tremendous influence on me and my work, the marks that I am making with paint, and the manipulation of it, can be aligned with rhythms, sounds and textures in the music I have listened to, since the 1960's onwards.
The Red Valley
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The Red Pony
The sheer magic of the large scale cinema screen, with it's panavision letterbox format and technicolour, along with the big sound effects, was something I experienced continually from a very young age. It was the introduction of a different world, learning a whole new language. I am translating my own view of the world down on to canvas, partly influenced by my experiences in the cinema. Jack Howells the Oscar winning film maker, has been another influence on me, I was fortunate enough to meet him in the 1970's, he was interested in what I was doing, and I found his observations encouraging.
I have absorbed the work of major painters as a result of seeing their shows first hand. Cezanne, Bonnard, Monet, Hopper, Wyeth, Matisse, Constable and many more, which has resulted in me crafting my own language in paint. I have taken this experience and vocabulary ' back home ,' and used my surroundings as a structure, to pursue my ideas in paint.
The starting point is familiar, and it allows a journey of wonderful anticipation, with the manipulation of paint. I build up the layers, investing the image with the sounds, sensations and experiences of my life. My preoccupation is with the beauty of the everyday,and the sheer joy of painting, of speaking in paint, and letting the paint speak."
Neil Carroll (The Spirit Fired)
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Art
NEIL CARROLL - HOME GROUND
Neil Carroll’s paintings are vibrant celebrations of the home ground of his childhood - the Heads of the Valleys villages of Rhymney and Butetown. These places are his touchstones. For him, painting the pigeon lofts, sheds, gardens and allotments amidst which he grew up not only brings back memories but pays tribute to the three close generations of his family who have lived in this one area. Like many of the best landscape paintings, these are pictures not so much concerned with capturing a view as with declaring love.
The vivid summer of childhood is captured powerfully in many images; cerulean blue skies, fence posts marching rhythmically through green and golden grasslands, and bright sun bouncing from the roofs of hillside houses. Other pictures have a sub-fuse, twilit mood, as in the studies for Pond Farm and the haunting Home I, in which a woman’s figure turns away, head bent. Beyond her is a little caravan in which the Carroll family’s holidays were spent, now forever rooted in the bottom of the garden. Ghostly figures sometimes appear like memories, half present and half not, as in the fading presences of Walking Up.
Carroll’s intimate concern for one territory follows in a landscape tradition of Constable, Bonnard, Hopper and the Welsh artist Bert Isaac, all of whom found potential in the micro-study of the everyday location. His vivid colour is influenced by Cézanne and Matisse, and perhaps, closer to home, John Elwyn. His handling of paint is lovely - wide washes of colour broken with abstract patterns and bold, decisive marks that recall Howard Hodgkin.
Neil Carroll was born in 1958. He trained at Newport College of Art, where he studied under Ernest Zobole and John Selway among others, and UWIC in Cardiff. His major solo exhibition The Spirit Fired was held at Newport Museum and Art Gallery earlier this year.
Dr Peter Wakelin
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Neil Carroll
