Alice Neel’s biography confirms what all true artists know. There will be pain at either end of the equation that attempts to reconcile creativity with survival. For all true artists it is create or die. The difficult negotiation between the need to create and the longing for the promise of domestic stability and companionship has been a source of pain for both artists and their families always. Even the stoics who tough it out by themselves don’t escape loneliness. And for Neel there too existed a marginalization by the declared professionals of the day; the same sycophants who now cannot find praise enough, ignored her work within the confines of her own generation. An unkind adversity many an artist is condemned to suffer. When standing in front of her paintings I get the sense that everyone who posed for her is implicated in her suffering. When you sat in the chair you enlisted to have your fortune told by a diabolical mind reader who could and would penetrate every barrier unconditionally. When you got up you could not possibly have the same pretensions about yourself that you had before the sitting (Linus Pauling excluded; still deluded by his own insipid smile). And as viewers we too are implicated in this seance of truth and see a particular part of ourselves clearly in the faces on the canvas. With the exception of a few sympathetic children and other chosen innocents, no one is given a pass. Last but not least is technique: To the uninitiated the paintings may look like the casual improvisations of a well meaning yet untutored primitive. But to those who are in possession of a visual syntax, Alice Neel’s virtuosity is striking and it makes me think of shorthand; shorthand as used to encode quantities of information into a symbolic economy that when deciphered discloses every word and every letter representing the contents of the subject, in its completeness. That’s exactly what she did. She invented a shorthand that permitted her to record every detail of her clinical analysis of what is visible and invisible to the eye and that in turn in the fullness of time unfolds itself in the eye of the viewer. [http://www.timesquotidian.com/2010/06/16/thoughts-regarding-alice-neel-2/]