Lillian Neilson, artist; born Kirkcaldy, 1938, died Aberdeen, January 6, 1998
Lil Neilson studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art from 1956-60, including a summer school at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath. She completed a post-diploma year tutored by Hugh Crawford and Alberto Morroco in 1960-61 and was awarded a travelling scholarship to France and Italy in 1961-62. On her return she joined Joan Eardley in Catterline: they had become friends in 1960 at Hospitalfield House and Eardley invited Lil to paint in the studio she and Annette Stephen shared in Catterline. Like many other painters and visitors, Lil became enthralled with the place.
At this time Lil also worked backstage with Reet Guenigault in theatres including the Traverse in Edinburgh and also in England, returning to Catterline to nurse Eardley when her illness was diagnosed in the new year of 1963. Reet joined them three months later to take over to give Lil a rest, and after Eardley's death in August of that year Lil bought No 2 South Side, Catterline, to make her home in one half and studio at the other end.
Some pictures of this period show Catterline views which Eardley famously painted, especially with the great round moons low in the summer sky. Neilson's foregrounds are less detailed and the viewer's eyes are led upwards towards the sky. Another, an interior, has a dresser lit from the front with all the paraphernalia on it laid in with a palette knife very elegantly. A blue china teapot is brush painted in tenderly and so is the window to the left above the dresser. The light flooding in from this reflects on to the wall at the window's side and the contrast suggests that the dresser is beautiful by visible colour and form and the window's light is beautiful by being ineffable.
Lil continued to work in theatres until 1969, when she returned to Catterline to try to work through the Eardley influences which had been made more than a bitter cup. She felt that she must paint that problem out in Catterline.
She spent some time in Norfolk with Gaydon Phillips, but not many paintings of Norfolk exist and she returned to paint in Catterline regularly over the next nine years. She moved permanently to Catterline in 1986 and, once there, Joyce Laing's Pittenweem gallery exhibited some of Lil's work which showed new directions. The works at Pittenweem showed tarry, choking matrices studded with plastic-bucket-like colours with a gasping fish here, a ship pulling along there, or an oil lamp lighting darkly. At this period Lil had undertaken to do monthly surveys of the state of a representative beach nearby.
She made new contacts in Aberdeen, where she followed shiatzu classes, dance therapy, became interested in meditation, and followed the sahaj marg (the natural way) until the last. She joined printmaking classes in Dundee at the printmakers workshop in Seagate and relished being a student again.
In 1989, at the 369 Gallery, Cowgate, Edinburgh, an exhibition shared with Annette Stephen showed a two-room retrospective of Lil's work. Nothing prepared the viewer for the last room, which contained the new paintings that had evolved out of years of anger at the treatment of the sea and land.
The Dundee printmaking classes at the Seagate led to an invitation to do masterclasses and these led to ways of harnessing this serendipity for the enormous scope and beauty of her last show, Certain Days and Other Seasons, last year at both Seagate and Aberdeen art galleries.
Lil pronounced this to be ''the end of my life's work'', prophetically as it turned out, for by August 1997 it became apparent that this private and reticent woman had been working under duress for the past two years as the extent of her disease was discovered.
Lil's good friends and neighbours loved and nursed her, enabling her to be in her beloved Catterline until she needed the services of Roxburgh House.
Lil achieved her goal of bucking the mantle of Eardley-name freeloader. As far as regular followers of her work were concerned she never deserved it, and all knew her as one who hated pretension.
Rosie Hooper
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