Margaret Neill, Traces #7, 2009, 22" x 30" page, 18" x 25.5" image, charcoal on paper
Margaret Neill has completed a beautiful new series of charcoal drawings, being presented as an online project by Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts in Tribeca. These are deeply sensuous works with dense black shapes built from layers of charcoal rubbed into the surface of the paper, and white spaces activated by charcoal smudges and erasures. The images are simple curves and intersecting geometries, fragments of infinite configurations that form focused interactions of light and dark -- an elegant fusion of physicality and grace.
Margaret Neill, Trek, 2005, 17 x 24 inches, charcoal on paper
Receiving a recent note from Brooklyn painter Margaret Neill prompted me to revisit her work. I've long admired her paintings -- undulating curving color bands with deep layered surfaces -- but I was not familiar with her drawings. Explorations of intersecting archetypal shapes -- arcs, elipses, circles -- in dense charcoal on white ground, these works are beautifully direct and sensuous. Their configurations are at once primal and analytical, the products of a highly focused painter's engagement with her materials, with the discipline of drawing, and with the world.
Margaret Neill, Traces #7, 2009, 22" x 30" page, 18" x 25.5" image, charcoal on paper
