Nell’s small oil paintings, measuring 8x10 inches on birch panels, capture the essence of a moment, a place, and a sensation in nature. Less specific places than visual haikus, the works conjure a universal understanding and perception of space, sky, land, clouds, grass and trees. Most of the artist’s rich paintings are built in thick impasto, and refer-ence something the artist has seen in nature and remembers, a cloud formation, a nighttime sky, and a twilight haze on verdant hills. When Nell sees a natural phenom-enon he would like to transform in paint, he often takes notes on colors, shapes, light, atmosphere, desiring to re-create nature’s palette in his unique distilled format. He is as captivated by the light and shadow of day as he is by the mysteries of the night, by the way light flickers on waves in the ocean, sparkles through dense summer leaves, and is minimally present when the sun leaves the sky.

Composition 197
2007, oil on panel, 6 x 10 inches

Unlike his earlier panel paintings of the same scale of more literal “scenes” in the landscape, trees, flowers, a vista that suggested a place, the new paintings are more abstract as they focus in on more intimate details. Color has changed in the new works, whites are more filled with light, and deep dark blue skies emit the air of night with pinpoint sparkling stars. Skies are hues of blue, either pale and filled with summer heat, or deep, rich blue with puffy white clouds. The horizon of blue sea against pale pink-blue sky with a foreground of sable colored sand is practically an abstraction of color harmony that resolves into an image as the eye focuses on the artist’s vision.

Composition 180
2006, oil on panel, 6 x 10 inches

Composition 188
2007, oil on panel, 6 x 10 inches

Composition 201
2007, oil on panel, 6 x 10 inches

For the first time, Nell includes three family portraits in this exhibition, one of his wife and two of his sons. Each of the figures is set against the landscape the artist loves, never a landscape with horizon line, a part of the landscape, either the trunk of a tree, or the branches, rarely both. Light infuses and suffuses the faces of the artist’s young blond- haired boys, giving them a kind of angelic presence in the lush green surround.

Composition 196
2007, oil on panel, 6 x 10 inches

Nell’s paintings, all of the same scale, are not titled, but numbered. Each is called “Composition #,” and each is consecutively numbered, one after the other, like a tone poem. The artist’s intellectual approach to his identification of the works removes any personal association and focuses on the meditative quality of the paintings. His genuine fascination of the natural world, and close observation thereof, allows him to delve deeper into the nuances of nature. Sometimes an ethereal white cloud becomes the entire painting with the slightest glimmer of blue at the edge; in others he fills the panel with a night sky, so dense and dark the viewer’s eye has to adjust to the lack of light to see the tiny sparkling stars and the ghost-like shadows of black trees. It is clear from the artist’s “compositions” that structure is as important to him as is the desire to paint what is “essential” in nature. Rarely does he depict an entire “scene,” for Nell the smaller passage or detail suggests a larger universe.

Composition 191
2007, oil on panel, 6 x 10 inches