Profiles of Artists exhibiting at The Beauly Gallery

Profile of Jim Neville

Jim lives with Kate, who also paints, and their twins, on the Black Isle, in a cottage with a beautiful view and a big, big sky. I am an incomer from Glasgow, coming to the Highlands in 1982. I have now lived here longer than I have lived in Glasgow. This is my home. My work currently uses still-life and landscape motifs, and draws on a Scottish painting tradition that spans across; Redpath, Gillies, Maxwell, Mclure, Morocco, David Martin, etc. Occasionally, I look further afield to St Ives, Peter Lanyon and Ben Nicholson or California to Richard Deibenkorn.

I choose not to plan my paintings, preferring instead to let the marks, the accidents, and my thoughts and feelings pull me wherever, however I only become fully aware of it long after the work is finished. I would wish simply that within these works, is imbued the evidence of countless marks and scratchings, the record of an on going and meandering process. Collectively they inevitably come to say something about me, my life, my thoughts at the time-something about my shaping. I hope that those viewing these works can bring them their own meanings and lived experiences and in doing so go on to reshape the works for themselves.