Works on Paper: Black and White
Drawing is central to my practice as an artist. I draw to investigate the properties of abstract curvilinear form found in the localized conditions of my surrounding environment. This experience is sublimated in a process both primal and analytical in developed drawings that are composed of deeply layered intersecting geometries and invite the viewer to contemplate presence in the fluidity of time.
I explore a singular concept- a reaffirmation of place: a lived emotional and physical experience in sensation and memory. Linear or solid, dense or transparent, the drawings move from one to the next in ephemeral yet solid works that celebrate light and space.
From BETH URDANG of BETH URDANG Gallery, Wellesley, MA
"Margaret Neill, a NY artist based in Brooklyn, has been making black and white drawings in charcoal and graphite since 1978. Neill acknowledges nature as one inspiration for these pure abstractions. Nature aside this is a joyful and confident body of work primarily about the pleasures of mark making: where you place your marks and where you don't, with white paper transformed into a beautiful light of what's in between. A trance-like mindset must be requisite for the focus and continuous motion necessary to make such dense and intricate, and minimal works. It's a risky business with little margin for error. Neill's drawings are equally satisfying as analogues for music - the lovely quiet sounds of layer upon layer of pencil-thin graphite swirls and the din of black of black ink and charcoal."
