“The artwork becomes a visual trip or story with paths to follow and secrets to discover and a story unfolding as one progresses”.
John Neeson’s colour saturated landscapes are maps in search of the deeper nature of place: the moment of exchange as the internal landscape is projected outside, and the external permeates and transforms the interior.
This is not landscape in any traditional sense, but a mapping of intensely personal and familiar terrain. Most recently, the surrounds of Harrietville, amid the foot-hills of the Great Divide; an area that John has physically and mentally wandered for decades.
This much loved landscape is distilled and compressed into a series of marks, in a sort of myth-making of place, with symbols of sensory clues, and states of being, reflecting intense personal attention to mind and place.
Neeson’s prints are landscapes without borders; where the interior and exterior worlds each subsume and engulf the other, become inseperable; the minutiae of perception inhabiting landscape as metphors of thought – wandering.
SOLO AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED)
1991 Anima Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia.
Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria.
1992 Warrnambool Print Prize Warrnambool,
Gallery Langenberg Amsterdam, “Travelling Exhibition” (3 Australian Artists) Belgium and Germany.
1993 International Works on Paper Fair, Sydney
1995 5th International Works on Paper Fair, Sydney
1997 Firestation print Show, Firestation Print Workshop, Melbourne.
1997 Insequence, Motorworks Gallery. Melbourne, Victoria.
1998 Decalogue: Ten Years of Australian Printmaking. Metropolitan Museum Seoul, Print Council of Australia, South Korea
2000 Atonement, Port Jackson Press. Melbourne, Victoria.
Death and Decoration: Plimsoll Gallery,Tasmanian School of Art at Hobart, University of Tasmania
2001 Australian Identities in Printmaking: Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery Collaboration: P.J.P. FitzroyWorkings of the Mind : Queensland University
2003 Out of Brighton,1966.Bayside Library, Melbourne,.
2005 Directors Choice Exhibition. Eastgate & Holst, Melbourne
2007 Eastgate & Holst Fine Art, Melbourne
2016 Wanderings & New Works on Paper, Eastgate Gallery, Melbourne
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Museum of Modern Art, New York
California Council of Art and Craft Collection, San Francisco, USA
Victoria and Albert Museums, London
London Print Workshop, London
Edinburgh Print Workshop, Scotland
Moksline Bibioteka, Vilnuis, Lithuania
Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, N.Z
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Gallery of Tasmania, Hobart
Geelong City Art Gallery, Victoria
Shepparton City Art Gallery, Victoria
Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria
Portland Art Gallery, Victoria,
Mildura Art Gallery, Victoria
Wagga Wagga City Art Gallery, N.S.W.
Art Gallery of Launceston, Tasmania
Deakin University Collection, Melbourne,
Griffith Artworks, Griffith University, Nathan, Qld
Stonnington City Council, Melbourne
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania
Firestation Print Workshop, Melbourne
