My first concern and preoccupation is always the physical act of painting as process and that gesture is the binding agent through which I find my subject matter and direction. Currently I am using colored squares and thin washes as I begin to build a structural matrix, and from it, observe patterns emerging. As the painting becomes a space, the references to known landscape realities create a sense of place only vaguely recognizable. Painting in layers applied thinly and thickly is the process through which I create a transformed world.

While water and weather dominate my current vision, the paintings also include elements such as air, density, weightlessness, mass, temperature, transparency, and light. Simultaneously through color, I often use a visual analogy to water in our own bodies, veins, and cells to ask questions such as what happens when water absorbs heat in nature, or in us. When looking through my work the viewer might raise such questions as: Is one looking at a cross section of a particular place containing ordered or random life-giving microcosms? Or is one looking at toxic elements growing in imagined, evolving systems in a landscape? Could these very elements be composed of microcosms that tip the balance at any moment?

For the last ten years I have painted images, often iconic forms that have ascended into space responding to ideas about mortality and regeneration by transcending matter into spirit through gesture and paint. This year I shifted from these vertical paintings to work on a horizontal plane and, as a result, I felt a return to the earth and to landscape. In doing so I have discovered water, strangely wonderful and mysterious, which has guided me towards this new body of work. Water implies and molds itself to the shape of its boundaries but those boundaries often shift and blur with the known world of landscape. A conduit of energy and life, water is always in motion.

— Anne Neely