Reflecting Neiland’s ability to be simultaneously figurative and abstract, is the torso referred to in the title the white, almost toga shape in the centre or the black, more witchy form beside it to the right?
Brendan Neiland, Torso, 2021
The reflectivity of glass façades has very often been Neiland’s prima materia. Over the years his paintings have rejoiced in more and more colour and jump-cutting.
I first met Brendan Neiland in 1984. The occasion was the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), marked by a Gala Dinner at Hampton Court Palace. The anniversary soon took a back seat, following a speech by the then Prince of Wales, who delivered a series of withering criticisms of contemporary architects and all their works, using the phrases ‘monstrous carbuncle’ and ‘glass stump’ to describe designs for the National Gallery extension and an office tower in the City of London.
The speech was an overnight sensation, fully reported in The Times and seized on by the media as ‘the voice of the common man’. I listened to it with some trepidation: if that is what he thought about modern architecture, what on earth would he have to say about modern art?
This was a pertinent point, because the reason Brendan and I were at the event was to present the Prince with a limited-edition print of a painting by Brendan of Fountain Court, part of Hampton Court Palace, as a memento of the occasion. The work had been commissioned by Building Design magazine, which I was editing at the time, hence our invitation.
Prince Charles may have had his criticisms of architects, but he spent a long time chatting to Brendan and me about the print, which was typical of Brendan’s work of that period – a combination of frozen images of shivering and shimmering façades and, in this case, water. In fact we received far more princely attention than the architects gathered in a VIP room after dinner. Art, apparently, was a more appropriate subject for discussion.
Brendan Neiland, Riposte, 2006
Artist Brendan Neiland’s art is exuberant. It rejoices in the world and in beautiful juxtapositions of the manmade and the natural, revelling in anything from the blooms of flowers to the neon nights of the city, high-speed trains and the sensuous lines of some cars. He likes high-code aesthetics conjoined with the low, all of which he renders in a palette of vivacious, spray-painted colour. It is not possible to pass a Neiland without admiring it. Paul Finch, founder of the World Architecture Festival, tracks his recent work and preoccupations.
Timeless Colouring
Observing Neiland’s work more than a decade later, in 1997, I could see the way in which he increasingly added the dimension of time to the relationships between architect and building, and between painter and observer. The most striking thing about much of the work seemed to me to be a sense of timeless tranquillity, even though the implication of the frozen images was that, though captured, things were moving on.
The work since 1984 was evidence of an artist himself moving on. Combined with travel across the world, the result seemed to have been an enrichment of approach, a certain head-on attitude to subject rather than the inevitably oblique outcomes of his trademark exploration of reflection – or rather reflectivity, which is not quite the same thing.
The colours were not simply as they were before. True, as for any artist concerned with sky and clouds, blue was never far away. But there was a greater interest in the colours of warmth and engagement, various hues of red which suggest a new relationship to (as it were) sun as well as sky. Whether by happy accident or deliberate choice, even the reflection paintings embraced a richer tonal palette, an active rather than passive relationship to the world portrayed. To some extent this must have been the artist’s choice: if you wish to find muted colours and more of the same, go to a central business district; if you want to set the pulses racing, go to Havana, or Costa Rica, or Manhattan.
Was it fanciful to detect a change in sensibility on the part of the artist, a movement along a spectrum which has observer at one end and participant at the other? The exacting discipline required to produce Neiland’s type of work (layerings of sprayed paint) has always evoked admiration – the attention to detail as particular as the fractions of buildings/cars/clouds that are portrayed. None of that changed. But a difference of emphasis was evident: you might say it was a switch from ‘what I see is what I feel’ to ‘what I feel is what I see’. And then paint. This is quite different from the instinct that informs nonpainters, for example architects, who generally try to draw what they see, or what they would like to see, or too infrequently a diagram of an informing idea.
Brendan Neiland, Cuban Light, 2011
The dazzling Caribbean sunlight reflecting on the car bodies in this painting cleverly transmits the sweltering temperature of Cuba and the mostly aged aesthetics of its automobiles.
Brendan Neiland, Shark, 2007
The Metamorphosis of Light
That is why someone who continues to be preoccupied, though not exclusively, with images of, about and created by buildings could scarcely be mistaken for an architect. This is an acknowledgement that for an artist, form, colour, light, effect, distortion and transformation are of equal interest as the architect’s inevitable preoccupation with three-dimensional volume, the manipulation of space rather than surface. The artist has no concern with building regulations, but the effect of light, shape and geometry are critical to the artist’s moment; this rather than that, that way rather than this.
Neiland’s work was becoming more colourful, literally and metaphorically, paying greater attention to movement and change rather than the recording of a moment in time. There was more implication of a dynamic at work, still most easily portrayed in relation to contexts involving reflection. This was both in and out of tune with the work of architects, whose own interests in glass, colour and reflection have been paralleled by a further concern with the solid – concrete and metal (and now increasingly timber) rather than glass alone. This is no doubt partly a matter of function, but also the result of exploration of materials, not just conventional masonry or concrete, but increasingly sophisticated screens, sometimes of an ornamental/digital nature, suggesting a reconciliation of art and architecture, but also an avoidance of reflectivity – the surface as playing a part rather than being merely a passive receiver.
Neiland, Consuella, 2014
Pattern, colour and the human body are combined to create an image again straddling figurative representation and abstraction as the night city advertises its charms.
Neiland’s work was becoming more colourful, literally and metaphorically, paying greater attention to movement and change rather than the recording of a moment in timeBrendan Neiland, Odyssey, 2011
Building façades in Neiland’s paintings often become kaleidoscopic, providing a festival of happy distortion and colour, artfully evoking blue skies and shining sunlight.
Neiland’s 2014 exhibition ‘Multiflections’ at Cork Street’s Redfern Gallery in London offered an opportunity to compare and contrast the work with that being produced 30 years earlier in the period of that Hampton Court event. The differences far outweighed the similarities, suggesting that the Neiland oeuvre had not just changed, but was evidence of a mature artist absolutely confident about subject matter, observation, analysis and artistic realisation.
The boldness of the work over the last 20 years is probably the consequence of Neiland having concentrated on his own artistic output since the abrupt severing of his RA status by the Royal Academy of Arts in 2004, an offence against natural justice which need not detain us here.
Striking Vividness
The work has become striking for its increasing use of vivid colour, drawn from travels abroad: New York, China and Singapore as well as Havana, Las Vegas, and probably his favourite location, Costa Rica. Startling contrasts of tone give a distinct feel to the work as a whole. Rather than the ethereal clouds and pale-blue skies of yesteryear, it now positively glows with rich hues and concentrated light.
Another noticeable element this century is a superrealist version of people – or rather images of people reinterpreted through an artist’s eye, however they were originally portrayed. The beautiful face, photographed,
digitised and used as advertising or show promotion by commercial hands becomes source material for another, ‘more knowing’ version of the same basic image, because we the viewers can see that this is a game of sorts. From my perspective as an architectural editor, it merges the Robert Venturi/Denise Scott Brown concepts outlined in their books Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966),1 and Learning from Las Vegas (1972).2 We have entered a world of Neon! Cowgirls! Lipstick!
Recent paintings also derive from the emotional response to what it is the artist has seen – but more importantly felt – on jungle safaris or wandering urban streets in the quest to find meaning or inspiration. When we view those illuminated signs and images, what exactly are we seeing? Not just advertisements or come-hither bar signs, but the backdrop to the stage-sets in which we act out our lives. The filter through which artistic production takes place, when it is working effectively, results in a reminder of what it is that we no longer notice. That is what provides the memorable moment between viewer and artwork. As Oscar Wilde remarked in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), ‘It is the spectator, not life, that art really mirrors.’3
In a world increasingly dominated by the visual in myriad forms, rather than by words and books, the relationship between viewer and viewed, and the midwifery practised by artist, sculptor, video-maker or digital magician, itself becomes a fuzzy interaction where
precision of meaning is as irrelevant as it is elusive. It is not the function of art (itself a contradiction in terms) to explain anything. It may illuminate, provoke, baffle, terrify or bore rigid. It is not the artist’s intention that matters; it is the effect on the viewer, which is unpredictable except where there is a knowing attempt to outrage respectable society, as Wilde would have put it. That is why real artists are true to themselves alone.
The themes identifiable in earlier phases of Neiland’s work seem to have broadened and intensified in recent years, rather than becoming concentrated reductions of the same ideas. Everything now is suffused with a light that dazzles, exposes and defines the line – both of thought and of the underlying drawing intelligence. Above all, the work is optimistic, vital, charged, intense. There is still abstraction, reflection and creative distortion, but there is figurative yeast in the multi-seeded loaf that the artist offers us, sliced for our enjoyment. It is exactly the opposite of half-baked.
Brendan Neiland, Chatter, 2018Signing and advertisements are also grist to Neiland’s mill, providing him with a lexicon of distortable typographies. We often recognise the brands and with them he reveals his Pop Art sensitivities and preoccupations.
Kaleidoscopic Town and Country
His ‘Reflections at 80’ Redfern Gallery exhibition, celebrating his 80th year in 2021, was a palace of varieties – flowers and nature alongside urban fabric, and distorting images from the world of advertising, display and automobiles. There is something devotional about the colour palette and the glow that imbues many of Neiland’s images, part celebratory, but always with a slight twist or ironic addition, or shivering effect where nothing is quite as straightforward as might first appear. The aesthetic journey apparent in the artist’s last three shows has paralleled travels in real life, with Costa Rica and New York a continuing source of inspiration and surprise – neither a monotone environment.
Certain sub-themes have emerged in recent years, including the collaging of manufactured and natural, or town and country. There is a sense that Neiland is an artist who simultaneously responds to what he sees, but sees things in a way that changes their character before the process of painting begins. You might say that an increasing interest in nature and biology has taken precedence over the ethereal nature of cloudscapes and reflections, with delight taken in the world of colour that nature provides.
His optimistic attitude to the possibilities of art and life was well in evidence in Lisbon at the World Architecture Festival where Neiland accepted an invitation to chair the special prize jury dealing with Use of Colour. He was able to admire its use in a three-dimensional context, a blurring of the line between architecture and art, part of his own world for the last 60 years. By chance, a parallel prize in 2022 was for Beauty in Buildings. An observation made at a festival conference session was that contemporary artists are interested in almost anything except beauty. One suspects that is probably not true of Neiland, though he makes no claim about the subject. Perhaps he subscribes to the Barnett Newman aphorism: ‘Aesthetics are to artists what ornithology is to birds.’4
The people in Neiland’s work are always beautiful; lipsticked lips blend with abstract colours, melding the human with the industrially constructed.
There is a sense that Neiland is an artist who simultaneously responds to what he sees, but sees things in a way that changes their character before the process of painting begins
Brenden Neiland, Serendipity, 2021
above: More recently, Neiland has experimented with combining his trademark city panoramas and set pieces with forms from nature. Instead of contrasting forms, this tactic makes the point that the swirling reflections found in the city are not so far removed from those naturally found in the countryside.
Brenden Neiland, Cowgirl Boots, 2013
opposite: Taking inspiration from over-the-top places full of palaces of pleasure, such as Las Vegas, the artist’s agile eye always alights on the iconic images that define his current location.
In any event, underlying the technique, the imagery and the colour, lies a more fundamental trademark of the real artist (and you would hope architects): the ability to draw. There are telling details in Neiland’s paintings that remind us about economy of line, indication without overegging, and idea not explanation. It is what one would expect from a mature artist, but it is a pleasure to see it achieved in such confident and life-affirming fashion.
The Neiland reconciliation of urban fabric or object with natural phenomena, the Constable world of light, shade and perspective, is why nothing he has ever painted can be described as ugly. The work might be regarded as a celebration of the pleasure to be found in unlikely places, the beautiful acknowledged, the ugly transformed. 1
Notes
Text © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Brendan Neiland, photography Hugh Gilbert 1. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture [1966], Museum of Modern Art (New York), 2002. 2. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 1972. 3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey [1891], Oxford University Press (Oxford), 2008, p 1. 4. Richard Shiff, ‘Introduction’, in John P O’Neill (ed), Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, University of California Press (Oakland, CA), 1992, p xxv.