Nashville Arts Magazine

Michael Shane Neal | The Master’s Touch

photograph by Jerry Atnip

Visitors to Michael Shane Neal’s Nashville studio pass through a pristine wooden gate and enter directly into a more delicate world. Drooping heads of pink roses shiver off raindrops as the fence door closes. A stone path leads through perfectly trimmed hedges to the artist’s two-story backyard workplace. There is an immediate sense of a boundary between this English garden path and the ordinary rows of houses beyond its edges. A quiet seems to hush a carefully tended world stolen from another time.

As if to further the illusion that one has stepped into the Gilded Age, Neal himself flings open his studio door sporting a pink oxford shirt, suspenders, spectator shoes, and a perfectly knotted bow tie. “Hello there!” he shouts in a friendly, excited voice. His dancing eyes, rapidly gesturing hands, and persistent efforts to make his visitors comfortable immediately convey the warmth and spirit that define his life and work.

“I love paint. I love trying to find somebody out of those colors on my palette.”

Neal smiles constantly, laughs often, appears thoroughly alive and interested in every moment. In spite of the fact that he is a father of two, there is something of the carefree schoolboy in his demeanor. One might not guess from his self-deprecating jokes, humble demeanor, and candid expression that he is a painter of international renown.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was so impressed with his portrait of her that she personally called at his Nashville home during her last trip to town. His work hangs in the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. He casually recounts receiving a phone call from the late Ted Kennedy to invite him to a birthday celebration for Senator Robert C. Byrd. His sitters include Senator Bill Frist, Arlen Specter, and esteemed actors from the Players Club in New York.

Adjusting his round-rimmed glasses, Neal begins by speaking about his parents. “I think I get hard work and dedication from my dad. I get my sheer enjoyment of people from my mom. My mother craves experiences, and I love adventure.”

When he was a child, Neal’s mother would say, “You can’t get anything by Shane,” in order to explain his observant nature. He elucidates, “Characteristics of people have interested me since I was a kid. I used to mimic people all the time—almost like an actor.”

This fascination with people shapes Neal’s work. “The part I enjoy the most is getting to go behind the scenes and get to know somebody…. I am not a psychologist, but I do a lot of psychology in my work. You are always trying to peel back the onion.”

“Shane Neal is as fine a portrait artist as there is in the United States today. He has the ‘Master’s Touch’, and is a delightful man.” –Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

Neal’s painting is unique because of two determining factors: his obsessive desire to present a living, spirited version of his sitters and his pure celebration of paint on canvas. His work is defined by a style which he labels “brushy realism,” stemming directly from the schools of John Singer Sargent, Sorolla, and Anders Zorn. His heavy, gestural brushstrokes infuse his style with a sense of poetry. Richly colored and sculpted in thick impastos, Neal’s technique has been the central focus of his study for years.

The painter’s early career was decidedly inauspicious when compared to his current style. Fascinated with Bob Alexander painting programs on public television, he decided that he wanted to learn how to paint. At age 15, Neal saved his first three paychecks from H. G. Hill where he made $3.35 an hour bagging groceries. He and his mother drove to Michael’s at Hickory Hollow Mall and purchased a presentation easel that the young artist mistook for a painter’s easel. His first dramatic brushstroke as a painter sent the easel crashing to the ground. Never a quitter, Neal taped its legs to the floor to hold it steady and continued working.

Neal kept at it through college at David Lipscomb in spite of the fact that the school had a small art department. A beloved teacher, Dawn Whitelaw, fatefully suggested that he take a look at the work of portrait painter Everett Raymond Kinstler. Neal still describes the moment in dramatic and meaningful overtones. He found a couple of books of Kinstler’s work at Lipscomb’s library. Enthralled and transfixed by the painter’s work, he did not even leave the building. He sat on the floor between two shelves poring over the pages cover to cover. Kinstler’s work in portraiture had an immediate effect on the young Neal. “When I got up I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

Through a series of chance connections Neal began corresponding with his idol after college. One of Neal’s acquaintances phoned Kinstler in New York to let him know about a young Nashville artist who was inspired by his career. Neal recounts, “I couldn’t even sleep that night because I knew Raymond Kinstler had heard my name once.” The first time that he personally phoned Kinstler, Neal recalls, “I was so nervous I wrote down everything I was going to say. I called twice and hung up both times.” He still speaks with rapt enthusiasm and genuine love for his role model.

Neal’s intimidation was perhaps justified. Kinstler has painted six presidents along with hundreds of luminaries from politics, the stage, and the silver screen. His training pedigree can be traced directly back to the master John Singer Sargent.

Eventually, Neal and Kinstler traded letters for personal visits and struck up a lasting friendship and professional relationship. Kinstler has taught Neal in the style of Sargent and Sorolla for years, and they have developed a master/pupil relationship that reminds one of the workshop models that shaped the history of art before the modern era. Kinstler was kind enough to speak to Nashville Arts Magazine on Neal’s behalf. He calls his student a “sensitive” artist, saying, “I have watched with enormous pride his accomplishments as a painter… He’s got his eye on the past. He believes in and follows a tradition and keeps enlarging himself.” Kinstler appreciates Neal’s open and kind personality, saying, “He’s got a wonderful attitude. I can’t think of anything negative to say about him. He is a fine human being and a wonderful talent.”

“When I was elected to a leadership office in the U.S. Senate, my responsibilities included overseeing the legacy of the U.S. Capitol by participating in the process that selects those very few artists selected to permanently adorn the walls of that magnificent structure. Shane Neal is one of those few. His genius in capturing the spirit, the emotion, and the feeling of his subjects led me to ask him to paint my official portrait, my three boys, my father and soon Karyn. “The process is fun. From interviews to assess what is important to the subject, to the on-site study of the Capitol rooms, to the enjoyable time spent with my boys and Karyn in his Nashville studio, we loved working with Shane and having him capture the values and images on canvas. He loves history; he loves America; he loves people—his work becomes a gift to us and the generations to follow.” –Senator Bill Frist

Neal’s technical method as a painter and psychological approach as a student of human nature affiliate his work with more historically rooted styles. “Interpretive painting has been lost in portraiture. So many people are accustomed to photographs. In the past, you went to a portrait artist because you liked the way they saw people.”

Neal states that dependence on working from photographs has turned many contemporary portrait painters into “copyists.” He prefers to work from life, using photographs only as a “tool.” He studies each of his sitters, interviews friends, reads books, notes—any evidence that he can find relating to their internal person. “I try to make each of my paintings as individual as the person I am painting,” he says. He combines his intense love of gestural painting style with his magnetic inclination towards other people: “I love paint. I love trying to find somebody out of those colors on my palette.”

Neal believes that his paintings are complete when viewers can get a sense of the unique person whom he portrays and simultaneously sense his own emotional language as a painter. “My interest is to get to the heart of something—I love that stuff! This is what I am trying to keep alive in my own work, which is disappearing. What makes it unique is the feeling of that person. There should be a feeling of the artist and a feeling of the person being painted.”

Talking to Shane Neal, the first thing that one notices beyond his innate charm and warmth is his love of stories. Neal is a consummate storyteller. One gets the impression that he cannot stop himself from telling them. They collide one against the other, progressing in train-like fashion. One yarn leads to another, which reminds him of another one. Neal claims that if he were not an artist, he would be a historian. He loves to investigate what makes people tick and to try to draw a narrative thread from all the contradictory and sundry aspects of a person’s behavior.

“I love to tell stories verbally, but I’m a storyteller in paint, too.” When meeting a sitter he asks himself, “What was the spark in their eye? What was the lack of spark in their eye?”

This fastidious study of the internal mechanisms of his sitters breathes life into Neal’s images. When approaching portrait art, a painter needs something more than a mere likeness of his sitter. He might capture every detail of their physical aspect and miss the very thing that makes them who they are. One might think in analogy of mounted butterflies. In reality, a butterfly is nothing more than the dead object secured by a pin. Yet no one thinks of mounted specimens when they think of “butterflies.” The fluttering, flitting movement of the object is part of its identity in our minds.

Neal’s lively brushstroke and careful study of his sitters convey a spirited and essential simulacrum of their person. It is his need to tell their stories, impersonate their voices, dance inside the boundaries of his canvases with paint that produces a powerful and moving portrait art. He has no movie camera or comic strip format to provide a linear narrative of a person’s life or tell a sequential narrative of how they came to be who they are. But by focusing on the delicate, evanescent flash of their personalities he tells whole stories of a person’s life in a single, silent painting.

Neal’s easy, outgoing personality allows his sitters to let him into their worlds, and viewers see in the sitter’s countenance a candid and vulnerable response to the artist himself. With powerful, simple brushstrokes Neal translates personality to paint. A gentle person, he expresses poetry and feeling with an expressive technical vocabulary. An observant student of human nature, he locates the myriad ticks and the rare essential traits that flicker in the eyes, movements, and souls of his sitters. His paintings are the result of a conversational exchange between sitter and painter—stories played out in the medium of paint.

by Deborah Walden | photography of Michael Shane Neal by Jerry Atnip