Biography
Neil was born and raised in the tiny town of Port Rowan, Ont., located on the sandy northern shore of Lake Erie. Daily life in the hardworking farming community creatively energized him. He enjoyed climbing aboard his grandfather’s tractors and re-enacting films like Rambo in the woods behind his family’s home.
Moving to Toronto to attend the Ontario College of Art and Design (’02), Neil worked summers in the heavy industrial environment of the Lake Erie Steel Factory. This put him in close contact with tar, the sticky, oozing byproduct of steelmaking. He soon began appropriating it in his art and continues to explore the aesthetic and conceptual potential of this medium. He says, “The discovery gave my work a new powerful energy, in the use of deep absorbent black with its strange almost reflective surface.”
His current work, Outlaws, marries tar with the stern faces of the Old West to draw comparisons between these rebels and the Big Oil culture we experience globally today. Much like the Big Oil companies of today, the Western Outlaw’s placed themselves above rationalism and the restrictions of the law symbolizing both a particular kind of freedom and an eternal type of perverse, ruthless greed.