Connie Connally: Biography / Artist Statement

Two women molded my vision as a painter: Alice Neel and Joan Mitchell.

First, Alice Neel:

It is not ironic that my artistic profession crystallized upon meeting the tenacious "painter of people", Alice Neel, in 1975 at the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum, Wichita, KS during her solo exhibit Portraits of Alice Neel. A self-proclaimed non-abstract painter, Neel doggedly held firm with her representational portraits during the domination of Abstract Expressionism. She persevered when women artists were pushed to the theoretical and critical margins of the art world. Her indomitable spirit and acerbic wit left an indelible impression on me. Neel was a 75 year old grandmother when I met her and I was a 26 year old having just earned my BFA. She had lived an amazing life and I was just starting mine.

Alice Neel's abstract expressionistic, muscular mark making in her paintings; like those of de Kooning or Chaim Soutine, are what attracted me to her paintings. The expressive, richly painted backgrounds, details of clothes and expressive faces were surplus to the representational painting. As Neel expressed, "I don't do realism. I do a combination of realism and expressionism. It's never just realism." The first half of my career as a figurative and portrait artist was deeply influenced by Alice Neel. Other artists like Lucian Freud would also influence, but it was Neel's astute psychological observations I aspired to emulate.

The same time I entered the competitive graduate program at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, exhibited at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, September 21, 2003 - January 7, 2004. Experiencing the great American "second generation" abstract painter's work would influence a change in the direction of my paintings toward abstraction. Mitchell had also moved from the tradition of the figure and portrait in the 50's to abstraction in the 60's. Her abstractions showed an almost superhuman ability in both scale and intellect for planning and building compositions. Continually reinventing the figure-ground model in abstract painting, Mitchell masterfully pushed white pigment into calligraphic fields of daring chromaticism. But as Mitchell insisted her paintings were "about feelings about the things I see in nature, and remember from my most intense experiences, and want to re-create."

And now, me:

In my studio resides the indomitable spirit of Alice Neel. Her tenacity is a constant reminder to work with courage and conviction. Joan Mitchell's courageous language of painting is the bar of excellence I aspire to. Both women used painting as a way of feeling life. I love that because that is what painting is for me...feeling life!

My abstract paintings actually start by working plein-air (in the open air) and most recently have been done with drawings. It is a means of establishing a link between me and what I am seeing in the landscape; a training course for contemplation so to speak. More complex transformations occur in the studio paintings with added layers of vision and meaning; working hard to retain the initial experience. I want to "re-create" my own intense experiences by building a connection between my language of abstraction and the perception of landscape.