Paintings 1980 - 2000
During this period Neil moved from town to city and his work reflects new themes of urban life, including interior still life compositions.
In his landscape paintings, the focus moves away from realism to exploring colour, form and the interaction of landscape features and texture. His focus is to achieve a strong sense of compositional order and unity from an often lengthy process of change and exploration within a painting. A use of low colour key is one means by which Neil achieves harmony in the final paintings.
His still-life paintings of this time explore the tension between objects in a shared space. The execution is reduced to a minimum and individual items appear to float on expansive surfaces.
By the end of this period Neil's work has moved almost entirely into an abstract appreciation of the physical world.