Read an excerpt of the article "Close to my bones" below
Anne Neely’s paintings have long focused on water, and her painterly embrace has been macroscosmic and microcosmic. The work expresses urgency about the climate and imperiled waterways, but never in a didactic way. Anne follows the unpredictable pathways her poured paint leads her along, and from those mixes of color and drips and pricks of pigment have sprung lush, expansive abstracted landscapes with colors you can sink into and dance with, and layers of mark-making that suggest worlds and ecosystems from bacteria to bubbles to entire biomes.
The scope of her world shifted after Anne received an ovarian cancer diagnosis in 2024. She is in remission after chemotherapy, and paintings made in the wake of her treatment are now on view in her solo show Wonder of the Light at Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Portland through August 15.
If her earlier paintings took us from the granularity of sediment to the vastness of the sky, these new ones bring the artist herself more directly into the picture. The shift was simple: Anne tilted her horizontal canvases vertically, and suddenly she was holding up a mirror instead of a lens. She has gone from the micro and macro of it all to the mezzocosm: The world of her own sensory and feeling experience. That was always there, of course, but these new paintings may be even more charged with it. Maybe that’s why she titled today’s Work in Progress piece Close to my bones.
And yet the world and the water have not disappeared. Really what that shift did was dissolve a wall between self and world, adding another dimension to her paintings. In the work she describes here, Best Clouds, Anne is still looking out at the sea and sky from her home and studio in Jonesport, Maine. Encountering herself and her mortality in ribbons of paint poured down the canvas, she finds love in the light of the sunrise, in looking at and meeting the world outside. These, too, are who she is and what constitutes a self-portrait: What the artist sees, how she sees, how it lights her up, and how it channels – through her hand and of its own accord – onto a canvas...
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Anne Neely, Best Clouds, 2026. Oil on linen. 80 x 60’. In Wonder of the Light, Elizabeth Moss Galleries, Portland.
All images courtesy Anne Neely.