Neal’s work is held in a variety of collections including the artists Gary Hume, Billy Childish and Jake Chapman. Recently he has taught drawing to post-grad students of The Princes Drawing School at his allotment. After the death of his parents his art practice halted, it would be over 10 years until Neal returned to making Art. His work has since been shown in many group exhibitions including twice at the John Moores, where he was prizewinner, and more recently in solo shows at L-13 and Southard Reid, London.
The close aesthetic relationship between Folk art, medieval English church painting and modernism is still highly influential in Neals work. He is interested in images of warmth, a kind of timeless human touch, often mournful. Possibly a reaction to the ‘bland powers of a global mass-media, shiny advertising and the glorifying of images in the pursuit of unit sales,’ Neal’s paintings are applied to wood found in skips around his local area. By editing, chipping away at or adding to, he creates not only an image but a one-off object all conceived by hand. For the future he is interested in searching out more symbols of landscape, including folk representations and investigate the reasons for their cover up, ridicule and recent resurgence.