Oil Studies

The small paintings Neil Welliver made outdoors (standing in streams, inside the woods, in snow) collected in a square catalogue that treats the studies as finished pictures rather than preparation.

Published by Alexandre Gallery for the exhibition of 1 May – 18 June 2004, the book reproduces thirty studies in color across 48 pages at 8 × 8 inches, with texts by the poet Mark Strand and the curator Robert M. Doty and a checklist at the back. The studies were painted on the spot in the Maine woods and then carried back to the studio, where Welliver translated them, without preliminary sketching, into canvases as large as eight feet square, so the small panels record both the observed motif and the compositional decisions the big paintings would inherit.

Welliver (1929–2005) trained at Yale under Josef Albers and taught for two decades at the University of Pennsylvania before settling in Lincolnville, Maine, where the surrounding forest, streams and quarries became his only subject. Alexandre Gallery began representing him in 1998 and continues to represent the estate.