Who is this Neal guy?

So you want to know who this Neal guy is and what lousy art school told him that he was an artist? Well the good news is that I have not ruined any art school’s reputation as I have never attended one. The art you see is raw and untrained. If you are curious why it even exists here is a bit about me.
Like most children, I liked to draw. And like most children, my parents thought that I had a talent. But hey! these were my parents! So I didn’t make much of it. Drawing for me was a way to express my interests. Without a doubt, my interests were airplanes and especially ships. Maritime disasters like that of the R.M.S. Titanic ( before it was discovered and then butchered in that James Cameron movie ) the R.M.S. Lusitania, Empress of Ireland, General Slocum, etc. fascinated me. Giant but
fragile ships with thousands of people at their mercy. I wanted to understand how they were built and how they worked. Then I would draw pictures, lots and lots of pictures ( and build numerous plastic model kits ). My father would tell me to draw him something other than a ship. Huh? what else is there? Oh yeah! airplanes! ( I don’t think that was what he was going for ).
Off the coast of Wales, Christmas 1983	Onward through school I went, drawing pictures somewhat to the detriment of my education. Teachers got frustrated with me but there wasn’t much that they could do. I did the bare minimum unless the subject matter interested me ( like science and drafting ). In high school, educators tried to direct me into an art curriculum but it was pretty much ingrained in me by others that you couldn’t make a living being an artist. There was also a big wide world out there that I wanted to see. To me, working on a ship was the way to see that world. So I set my art talent aside for recreation and went to school to be a Marine Engineer and work aboard merchant ships.
Working on a ship was everything that I had dreamed it would be. I traveled around the world on 3 ships as an apprentice engineer with interesting people who I learned much from. But when I was done with my education, it was 1986, when the US Maritime industry was crumbling. There were few jobs to be had at sea. So I settled for a job with a large car ferry operation. There, to pass the time, I started drawing cartoons of the employees and the comical escapades that they got into.	Inside a ship's boiler steam drum, 1983

Volunteering on the USS Olympia, 1988	My cartoons were very popular and again I started hearing about the talent I had and that I should be doing something with it. I listened, but still didn’t think that there was any real quality to what I was doing. Most all of what I drew was from memory, so the results were not exact. My people came out mostly as caricatures. One day I decided that perhaps I should get more disciplined and see what I could draw. I decided to work on people first by using models in advertisements. I was surprised at how easy it was for me to draw people from a photograph. Maybe there was something there after all.
Happier days with Jane in Europe, 1992
Then one day my world changed when I met a woman who had a mutual interest in classical music and music from the 1920's and 30's. My wife Jane. I wasn’t going to marry just anyone and that, Jane was not. She was intelligent, and articulate. Jane accentuated my talents, and tempered my faults. The kindest and most genuine person I have ever met. She, more than anyone else motivated me to explore my art and in directions I never considered. Having been an art history major in college, she loved going to art museums ( places that I never had any real interest in going to in the past ) but it was fun with her and she taught me a great deal. I started looking at the paintings and thinking that I too could do this. But color! wait a minute, that was something I had only done with pencil and was not too happy with the result. Instead, I decided to get really serious with my pencil work and created the series of World War II aviation art. I showed the aviation art around and people wanted to buy them. Instead of selling them, I had prints made and with the wonder of the internet and Ebay started selling the prints to an audience of millions. Using my technical background I designed my own website to see if there really was any interest in my other art. Sure enough, there was.	Hiking in New Hampshire, 1992
For Christmas of 2003 Jane gave me an easel. I went right to work. The paintings in my on-line gallery are the result ( they are in the order that they were painted, my first one, a Vermont landscape is not shown ) If it were not for Jane, there is no doubt that the only paintings that you would have seen from me would have been ships and planes. I wanted to show her that I was capable of much more. Then one day in March of 2005, tragedy struck us out of the blue. My beloved wife Jane, mother of our children, was diagnosed with a serious form of leukemia. We fought it together, but Jane did not survive the treatment. What a terrible disease. I don’t know how Jane was able to gather the strength to fight for the 5 months that she did. I don't know if I could have done the same. Kayaking with my daughters, 2004 Now, paintings will come fewer and far between as I focus all my efforts toward raising my 2 daughters. I will continue my art, and perhaps when my daughters are older, I will have additional time to pursue more painting. Hopefully you will poke around my website and find an image that you like to look at. The biggest thrill to me is that somebody out there likes something that I drew so much that they would be willing to pay for it and hang it on their wall. I never thought that this would ever happen with my feeble scratchings. Who would have guessed! Neal Painting, 2006 Neal, 2008