Birches, oil on canvas, Neil Welliver
Neil Welliver (July 22, 1929 - April 5, 2005) was an American-born modern artist, best known for his large-scale landscape paintings inspired by the deep woods near his home in Maine.
Welliver was born in Millville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) and then received an MFA from Yale University. At Yale, he studied with the abstract artist Josef Albers. Welliver taught at Yale from 1956 to 1966, and in 1966 began teaching at, and eventually became chairman of, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art, from which he retired in 1989.
While teaching at Yale, Welliver's style evolved from abstract color field painting to the realistic transcription of small-town scenes in watercolor. In the early 1960s he went to Maine, where he began painting figures outdoors, the large oil paintings often focusing on his sons canoing or female nudes bathing. In 1970 he moved permanently to Lincolnville, and by the mid 1970s the figure as subject had given way to the exclusive study of landscape... Wikipedia
