Moorland sky, September Painting

Artist Neil Bolton was born in 1958, studied Art at Ipswich and Norwich Schools of Art and worked for the Department of Art at Homerton College, Cambridge. Painting and drawing have been a lifelong activity for Neil who spent his childhood in the Suffolk countryside, a place that inspired a deep love for landscape and the natural world. Oil painting on canvas is the main form of Neil's art which is focused on the areas of landscape, portraiture and figurative, as well as still life. Made from direct observation of the subject by painting outside in the landscape in the manner of the Plein air artists such as Camille Corot, Claude Monet and the French Impressionists, paintings are finished in one session in the open air or over a long period of time in the studio using numerous studies in oil paint. Primarily a painter, Neil also uses drawing extensively to understand the subject, its structure and dynamics to generate ideas that open possibilities of how a painting may take form. Regular visits to familiar places in Cornwall, Suffolk, North Yorkshire and recently Andalusia in Spain, provide the basis of Neil's landscape painting. During painting, observation, ideas, memory and sensations merge with the abstract dimension of the paint itself. As Cezanne stated "There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind, each of them should aid the other." As a portrait artist, Neil prefers working with a small range of people, creating his finished work from many sittings in the studio. The result is an accumulation of the study of both the physicality and personality of the sitter. The qualities Neil achieves in his painting have resulted in him often being referred to as a painter's painter. Neil exhibits his work in a number of galleries in Cornwall and North Yorkshire and has paintings in private collections in the UK, America and Spain.