American (1929-2005)

Neil Welliver (American, 1929-2005) is best known for his large-scale, vivid paintings and woodcuts of the remote Maine wilderness.

 Welliver came of age as an artist in the late 1950's and 60's, at a time when nonrepresentational styles of painting like Abstract Expressionism and, later, Color Field and Minimalism were accorded the highest critical prestige. Along with artists like Larry Rivers, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein, Mr. Welliver strove to paint representational images without sacrificing the formal innovations that the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had introduced to modern painting.

In the mid-1960's, Welliver began painting large-scale pictures of nude female models in forest settings. Exhibited to critical acclaim at Alexandre Gallery in 2001, those pictures were animated by tension between the realistic illusions of nature and human bodies on the one hand and the surface patterns of wide brushstrokes, on the other.

By the mid-70's, Mr. Welliver had eliminated the figure from his work. Typically, he would paint outdoor studies of trees, grass, snow, rocks and streams encountered in places around his home and then translate the small paintings onto large canvases in the studio. Rendered with emphatic, generously paint-loaded brushstrokes, the myriad details filling the picture would create a kind of sensory overload of representational lucidity and abstract texture.

His paintings can be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the Hirshhorn and the Whitney, among others.