EYE to EYE: new work by JANE MACNEILL

Flying Lapwing - 45cm x 50cm - oil on board

What is art about? What makes one piece stronger than another? What will last? I have often pondered these questions as all passionate art-dealers must if they are to sort wheat from chaff. A true artist sees things that exist in an invisible but still equally real world. We non-artists catch glimpses of this place, but a true artist’s umbilical cord is professionally connected to it. But what is it? You must look at the art work and ask that question.

At its most simple JANE MACNEILL’s work are beautiful gold-leafed portraits of birds. There are fifteen in this exhibition; from a blue-tinged lapwing in flight across a golden ground, a fat waxwing that fills it frame, a one-eyed grouse that stares at you, to a light quick redpoll. The surprising thing is how much each portrait shouts out as an individual and how much respect is given to the bird.

Each of MACNEILL’s bird paintings is indeed a portrait. She has known every one of her ‘sitters’ (or ‘flyers’) even if it has only been for a second of eye contact. She will not paint an animal unless this eye contact has been made. That is the privilege of any portrait artist; to be allowed to look into the soul’s window. If you have that connected feeling with a Rembrandt or Valazquez portrait, you are seeing a soul livened by paint. This is what MACNEILL does for us. She brings back the memory of her eye-to-eye contact with the bird in its airy elements. It's not any bird she paints, but that precious shared moment.

Waxwing - oil on gesso panel - 30cm x 25cm

The gold-leaf used by MACNEILL is reminiscent of religious icons, Klimt and the Buddhas of Asia. Gold is a way to show veneration and permanence. Gold links birds to the divine. It is symbolic of the airy element they inhabit. ‘We are princes,’ it says, ‘you are not like us, you belong to the world of land and we belong to air.’

MACNEILL has a point here. Even the humble robin is raised by MACNEILL to an ethereal place. Are robins allowed on Olympus where mortals cannot tread? Even without a golden halo a bird can fly, so why not. Gold is illusive, it plays with light; dark one moment and glowing the next, but the truth of the birds’ flight is always there. They are Olympian creatures - that much is obvious. MACNEILL shows us the world of air even if it’s only caught for an instant.