Neil Welliver, dead at 75

[Root Doctor]

Neil Welliver, at 75; painter of reinvented landscapes
By Tom Long, Globe Staff | April 7, 2005

Moss-encrusted stumps, skeletal birch trees, a charred path left in the wake of a forest fire -- Neil Welliver's landscapes were as rugged as the Maine forest he lived in. His large-scale paintings were so realistic they appeared you could walk right into them.

But art authorities saw even more.

''Neil Welliver was responsible for reinventing the American landscape in a modernist idiom," Chris Crosman, director of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, said yesterday of Mr. Welliver, who died Tuesday in Waldo County General Hospital in Belfast, Maine. He was 75.

Mark Strand, a former US poet laureate and a friend of Mr. Welliver, said that the artist was pleased when people said it looked like they could walk into his paintings. ''But that's not the way he thought of himself," Strand said. ''He said he was bridging the gap between realism and abstraction."

Mr. Welliver did not paint the popular Maine images of lighthouses, scalded lobsters, and granite slabs descending into a pounding surf. He chose remote blueberry barrens, disheveled beaver lodges, and other woodland scenes near his homes in Lincolnville and on the Allagash River in the North Woods near Canada.

Crosman described his work as ''anything but pretty or comfortable." Robert Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine, once described Mr. Welliver's work as among the strongest images in American modern art. His paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

Mr. Welliver was born in Millville, Pa. He graduated from Philadelphia Museum College of Art in 1953 and Yale College in 1955. After teaching at Yale for 10 years, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Fine Arts from 1966 to 1989. From 1970 until his retirement in 1989, he commuted monthly to Philadelphia from his farm in Lincolnville.

He was a stocky, brusk man, often with a cheek full of chewing tobacco. He looked more like a big-game hunter than an artist. For much of his life, he fought what he called the art world's ''tyranny of abstraction."

Mr. Welliver lugged an 80-pound pack of painting supplies into the field. ''I never use paths. I go straight into the thickets," Mr. Welliver said in a 1996 story published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

He said he sought out what he called ''places of power." ''If you give yourself to a place, you begin to feel its power," he said. ''For me, these places are often nondescript corners, small things, not the big 19th-century vistas of the Hudson River School," referring to the grandiose, romantic images of the American wilderness by Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and others.

Mr. Welliver's life was as tragic as his career was triumphant. In 1971, his best friend drowned in a pond in Maine. In 1975, his farmhouse burned to the ground and much of his work went with it. In 1976, his daughter Ashley died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Six months later, his wife, Polly, died of a viral infection. In 1991, his 20-year-old son, Eli, was murdered while studying in Thailand.

Through it all, Mr. Welliver continued to paint.

''He saw a lot of tragedy. His life was one horrible happening after another," Strand said, describing him as a man with a lot of energy and will power, who was opinionated and loyal. ''If it had been me, I would have gone crazy."

Mr. Welliver created larger works from his field studies, often pieces 8 feet square, under a skylight in his barn-studio.

''I have absolutely elephantine memory for what I see," he said in the catalog of a 1996 retrospective of his art. ''I even remember pine needles and how they lie. When I'm painting big pictures in the studio, my mind is running wild. To a certain extent you relive the experience of nature on a greater scale and, one hopes, better."

In recent years, Mr. Welliver suffered a heart attack. He also suffered from hydrocephalus, commonly called ''water on the brain," and was confined to a wheelchair.

But he arranged for others to enjoy his land by donating nearly 700 acres to Maine's Coastal Mountain Land Trust. Now those who felt as if they could walk into his paintings will be able to do the next best thing: visit the places that inspired them.

Mr. Welliver leaves his wife, Mimi Martin Welliver; three sons by his previous marriage, Titus B. of Los Angeles, Ethan A. of New York, and John W. of Rockport, Maine.; three stepchildren, and two grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. July 22 in St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Belfast, Maine. It would have been Mr. Welliver's 76th birthday

[Brian Olewnick]

Oh man, very sad to hear this. A wonderful, subtle painter.

[Gary Sisco]

Well, now I have no favorite, living painter.

RIP, Mr Welliver.

I got to meet him once, for an afternoon at his place in Maine. By complete accident, I found that the friends I was visiting were longtime friends with him, and that he only lived a mile or so away. He showed me his studio and explained his process. It was a fascinating day, and he was very generous with his time, especially considering that he was in full grief over the murder of his son, the year prior.

One of a kind.

[Root Doctor]