Nick Macneil

Nick Macneil (b.1992) is a London-based painter, and holds both a BA (2014) and an MA (2018) in Fine Art Painting from Wimbledon College of Art. ​

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Macneil paints what he calls the “behaviours” of clouds, water, light and organic material. This allows him to abstract from what they do, rather than what they are as permanent subjects. From clear skies with scattered vapour smeared across them, to refracting water, or light shifting from harsh to blurred as it passes through translucent surfaces such as mist or a window blind, his work explores these fleeting visual experiences.

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Macneil’s work is driven by an interest in the neurological and evolutionary origins of how we experience visual language. He seeks to anchor painting in something more primeval, perhaps something the very first organisms were aware of: light, dark, fast, slow, pleasure, pain, organic, non-organic. Fundamentally, he wants to engage with modes of perception that predate symbolic thought.

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He creates a symbiotic relationship between areas of the painting that spread across the surface, rather than thinking of these areas as individual elements that need to be deciphered. The result is an immediate overall statement, where the viewer is presented with all the information at once, in a single wave.