Neil Gavin Welliver[1] (July 22, 1929 – April 5, 2005) was an American modern artist, best known for his large-scale landscape paintings inspired by the deep woods near his home in Maine.
At Yale, he studied with the abstract artists Burgoyne Diller and Josef Albers, whose theories on color were influential.
In 1966, he began teaching at, and eventually became chairman of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art, from which he retired in 1989.
While teaching at Yale, Welliver's style evolved from abstract color field painting to the realistic transcription of small-town scenes in watercolor.
His mature works, often as large as 8 by 10 feet (2.4 by 3.0 m), are at once richly painted abstractions and clear representational images of intimate Maine landscapes, taking as their subjects rocky hills, beaver houses, tree stumps, and rushing water, occasionally opening out to blue cloud-laden skies.
His equipment-laden backpack weighed 70 pounds, and included eight colors of oil paint: white, ivory black, cadmium red scarlet, manganese blue, ultramarine blue, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, and talens green light.
[9] The Dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Frederick Steiner, responded in the same paper with a letter offering support to the op-ed and asking other readers to come forward with similar stories.