Francesca Neal

The paintings start from internalised distillations of visual experience, from the everyday and more recently from the landscape I find myself in, having returned to North Wales. Conversely, the paintings are creating a sense of space and not a place.
I’m making paintings about painting where the work explores the sensorial possibilities of paint. Each painting is centered around visually arresting compositions that contain complex shapes and colour arrangements, which aim to trigger perceptual and emotional responses. The work is less concerned with image and more with an expansion of sensory information. Paint is the meaning and in this way encourages slower looking and a more intimate inspection of the surface.
There is a playful approach to composition that produces a painting in which the boundary between what is foreground and what is background is blurred.
The human hand is visible in the making of each painting, through the slips, drips and imperfections of the surface; this provides a space to let the viewer in. There are interesting moments in each painting where the paint does its own thing despite me and leads me to make new decisions. Tensions between carefully handled surfaces and hard edges overlaying the sli...

MFA Fine Art, Manchester School of Art
BA (hons) Fine Art, Northumbria University

2017 The Manchester Contemporary, Manchester
Central, Manchester
2017 Paintings by Francesca Neal (solo show), Lyon
& Turnbull, London
2017 WCAF17, Warrington Museum and Gallery,
Warrington (prize winner)
2017 This is it - MFA Show, Holden Gallery,
Manchester
2017 Platform, The Great Medical Disaster
(Castlefield Gallery), Manchester
2017 xxxhibition, The Grovesnor Gallery, Manchester
2016 MA Show, Holden Gallery, Manchester
2016 Spectrum: Open Exhibition, PS Mirabel,
Manchester
2010 Helfa Gelf, Pentre Studios, North Wales
2010 The Peter Edwards Award 2010, Oswestry
2008 Graduate Fellow Show 2008, Gallery North,
Newcastle Upon Tyne
2007 Out of the ordinary (solo show), Manorhaus,
Ruthin
2007 It’s dead we killed it, Northumbria University
2007 Polaroid show, 4th Floor gallery, Northumbria
University, Newcastle Upon Tyne
2007 Sakaide Art Grand Prix, Sakaide gallery, Japan
2007 07 British Young Artists Group Exhibition,
Sakaide gallery, Japan