Offshore Winter
A Group Show
November 7 – December 27, 2025
"The early paintings mark the transformative, if not to say slow, awakening of Welliver’s own work. The ravenous, raucous, uncontained early works ricochet between abstraction and realism. In the late landscapes, for which he is best known, the seem- ing slapdash urgency of these early paintings dis- sipates into something new, vital, and central to the artist’ s being. In W elliver’ s mature, monumental paintings of Maine’s northern forests and streams we see a new kind of painting where surface han- dling, painterly gesture, and subject — unruly nature — seamlessly merge and quietly coalesce. The fading memory of those manicured lawns of suburban academia — Manet-like picnics on the grass with fellow faculty accompanied by nude models, dogs, sheep, and general dissonance — eventually yield to the randomness of nature for its own sake on its own terms. Those early collisions of fantasy and reality — butterflies and friends, sheep and tubas — finally resolve into Welliver’s full, final embrace of plangent nature, as source and solace."
Widely admired for his painterly transcriptions of the Maine landscape, Neil Welliver (1929 - 2005) was born in Millville, Pennsylvania, and earned a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1953 and an MFA degree at Yale University in 1955, where he studied with Josef Albers and Burgoyne Diller. He was a studio instructor at Cooper Union in New York City before teaching at Yale for ten years beginning in the mid-1950s. His final academic appointment was at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as chair of the Graduate School of Fine Arts from 1966 to 1989.
A strong advocate for land conservation and stewardship, he purchased a large farm in Lincolnville, Maine, in 1970, and commuted from there to teach in Philadelphia. Upon his death, he bequeathed 700 acres to Maine's Coastal Mountains Land Trust. Welliver was a member of the National Academy of Design and received notable awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among many others.
