Brian Neish is a full-time professional artist living and working between France and the UK.
He has exhibited regularly since changing career and is represented by the Store Street Gallery in London.He is fascinated by painted surfaces on functional items such as panels, shutters and doors, and particularly surfaces having to endure the extremes of weather and erosion.
He calls the appearance of these debilitating effects ‘Noble Decay’ to suggest a sense of them displaying increasingly unique visual qualities over extended periods of time. His working process involves incorporating a number of layers of oil colour to build up textural effects and express something of the actual properties inherent to the paint as a material in its own right. This process is augmented by selecting contrasting or harmonious colour values as the layers build up upon themselves.
No attempt is made to conceal older compositional arrangements in a painting – everything is used for dynamic effect so that even light from different sources highlights line and contour through the casting of shadows. An unintended consequence of all his work seems to be a sense of capturing a moment in Time: in terms of the actual time required for a painting to evolve through his system of layering, to the more expressive dimension implied by the surface on the work.
The Timelapse Project 