About
The Artist
Neil is a self-taught painter, illustrator, and digital artist working at the provocative boundaries of contemporary queer art. In the early 90s, Neil was an artist and writer for the short lived gay superhero series, Go-Go Boy, creating his first artistic ties to the community. Following that Neil set down professional roots in animation’s 1990"s resurgence, where he was storyboarded for seminal series including Batman: The Animated Series, Pinky and the Brain, Freakazoid, and Johnny Bravo. This foundation in visual storytelling still informs Neil’s current work.
After a long hiatus from art, a 2022 traumatic brain injury catapulted Neil back into the world of visual creativity. At first drawing was a form of rehabilitation as the injury "rewired" his perceptions. The result was a bold, evolved pop-art style. Today, Neil’s work explores the homoerotic elements of gay, kink, and fetish culture, filtering the intensity of these subcultures through the lens of real-life practicality and a touch of humour.
Central to Neil’s practice is his ongoing collaboration with the Vancouver Men in Leather (VML). While his GRUNT night posters are promotional material, they are also a visual history of these events. In this way Neil is intentionally building an artistic record of Vancouver's rapidly developing modern kink and leather scene. These aren't just ads for a Saturday night; they are snapshots of a cultural movement - not just capturing the spirit of Vancouver’s queer fetish community, but helping create it as well.
Process
The pieces you are viewing are all hand drawn and painted original digital art. To achieve the pieces I apply traditional sketching, charcoal, inking, and oil painting techniques using an app that frustratingly simulates these media.
Process
Each piece goes through the following steps:
Idea - the glimpse of a scene, a fleeting moment of fantasy, or a concept I want to convey.
Thumbnails - tiny loose sketches to work out a composition, figures, gestures, and the scene, calling back to my animation days 30 years ago.
Rough Sketch - I photograph and enlarge the thumbnail then create a rough sketch.
Photo Reference - If needed I’ll shoot reference photos on my own using friends as models. Often I skip this step, since my brain injury my visual memory got rewired, and some images just stick.
Refined Sketch - a near fully worked out sketch like Three Alone, or Morning Coffee.
Colour Studies - 2 or 3 loose paintings to work out the colours and values of the piece. My post injury/rewired brain loves colours.
Painting/Illustration - I often mix these two together. This process can take weeks, sometimes months. You don’t get photo like results without some sweat. As you get closer to painted pieces like Couple 2 - Tender, or Baths 1 - Triptych the more abstract they become as you see the brush strokes.
Printing - Initially I was leaning heavily into digital artwork, but in the age of AI I have eschewed that for traditional media; primarily acrylic, pen, pencil and ink.