Artist

Neil, Al

Title

Rene Daumal: Portrait 6

Technique

collage

Date

1992

Dimensions

76cm height x 56.5cm width

Type

mixed media

Accession Number

1992.23

Owner

City of Burnaby

Collection

Permanent Collection

"Purchased with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance program/Oeuvre achetée avec l'aide du programme d'aide aux acquisitions du Conseil des Arts du Canada".

Al Neil is a pianist, composer, visual artist and author born in Vancouver, B.C, in 1924. Neil is a mostly self-taught jazz pianist who began playing in Vancouver clubs in the late 1940s with his own groups and as a sideman to other musicians. Neil was a central figure in the 1950s and early 1960s at the Cellar, a musician-operated club. Neil is also an important literary and visual arts figure. His writings, which are often of a semi-autobiographical nature, recount his experiences as a musician and include poetry, a novel and a collection of short stories. As an artist, he organized multimedia performances throughout the 1970s and turned to mixed-media collage in the early 1980s. Most of his infrequent concerts/readings/installations during his post-Cellar period have been in gallery settings, for example, at the Sound Gallery and the Motion Studio (1966), the Vancouver Art Gallery (1968, 1972, and 1989), the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1969), Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1973), and the Coburg Gallery, Vancouver (1984-7). He also performed in several concerts in Vancouver in the 1980s at the Western Front, where an exhibition of his Origins: Celtic Series collages was mounted on the occasion of his 65th birthday.