About the Artist
Nealy May Riley is a contemporary wildlife painter. Her work is a balance of expression and realism that captures the spiritual essence of animals. Nealy creates ethereal or dreamlike environments for her subjects that are often abstracted or designed to create a feeling of nature mysticism for the viewer.
Nealy uses a mixed media technique that gives her work the appearance of an extra dimension. Gold foil and acrylic paint combined with her reductive and additive painting method creates reflective areas in her work. Room lighting affects these reflective areas resulting in visual value shifts that heightened interaction between Nealy’s artwork, its hanging environment and the viewer.
Nealy has a Master of Fine Art from the Savannah College of Art and Design. After a career in Graphic Design and teaching at the collegiate level, she and her family now live in Utah where she paints and enjoys the wildlife of the Mountain West.