Press
1960s
It is heartening to see the work of a young man who combines vitality with a healthy respect for tradition. He obviously stands on the threshold of a promising career.
Dundee Courier April 1960
The honour of having his self-portrait accepted by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters has been conferred on Neil Dallas Brown. It is now on view at the society’s annual exhibition in the Royal Institute Galleries, London.
Dundee Courier 24.11.60
Neil Dallas Brown is not yet thirty. If he continues to paint as well as he is doing here I shall predict for him a considerable future.
Sidney Goodsir Smith, The Scotsman 10.7.64
His is a remarkable talent and I think that here is a young artist to be watched.
Terence Mullaly, Daily Telegraph 13.2.67
This exhibition of paintings reveals a painter with an impressive and easy command of his medium.
Robert Macdonald, The Scotsman 1967
1970s
Neil Dallas Brown won the first purchase prize(£1,000) with the painting ‘Fallen Angel’ in an exhibition sponsored by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and presented at Bedford House , Belfast earlier this year.
Art International November 1970
Mr. Brown is a painter of his own unique order of grandeur and his exhibition again dominates our admiration.
O. Blakeston, Arts Review 21.10.72
It was Neil Dallas Brown’s ‘Night Bather with Dog’ to which I found myself being continually drawn.
Timothy Mason, Arts Review 1972
Re: Summer exhibition Piccadilly Gallery
Neil Dallas Brown is an extremely accomplished artist a man of considerable artistic sensitivity and superb sense of craft. At thirty seven he is still capable of much development and it is a mark of his stature that we can look forward to his future.
Alan Bold, Question magazine 1975
Postgraduate study in London and extensive travel abroad may well have contributed to the forging of a vision whose nature is universal rather than insular in its connotations. Indeed many of the characteristics frequently associated with Scottish painting- sumptuous colour or expressive gesture for instance- have no place in his art. Restricted mostly to earth-coloured mono-chromes, Dallas Brown’s vision depends on a smooth but broad and painterly approach in which subtle chiaroscuro, silky draughtsmanship and gently polished surface finishes play significant roles.
Edward Gage, Arts Review 14.11.75
1980s
Neil is a ‘ hungry’ painter not because he has sometimes been hardup but because he is a fully committed and ambitious painter, a man who acts and sleeps painting, a man possessed by his art.
Timothy Neat Shroud series (Ulster) 1980
Neil’s images express not denominational preference but human concern and human abhorrence. He is a man who thinks in pictures. He gives images of brutality a prickly sensuality, a strange beauty that excites and invokes pity.
ibid..
But despite the ominous menace in these paintings they can be strangely beautiful, for Dallas Brown is not just preoccupied with expressing hatred and inhumanity. He is also concerned with formal relationships, structures and symmetry. He carefully composes his pictures using juxtapositions of soft and hard, vertical and horizontal, painterly texture and flat empty surfaces.
Claire Henry, Glasgow Herald 7.10.82
Kirkaldy Art Gallery Exhibition
Don’t be taken in by the subtle chiaroscuro, the silky draughtsmanship, the gently polished surface finish of Dallas Brown’s work. The teeth and claws are there snapping just beneath the surface. The message is self evident if you take the time to look.
Claire Henry, Glasgow Herald April 1983
Collins Gallery Exhibition
1990s
Peaceful yet thought provoking, his works are a wonderful amalgamation of dreams and reality.
Sally Kerr. Glasgow Herald 16.2.95
Open Eye Gallery Exhibition
This is not so much a new Dallas Brown as a synthesis of all he has learned, an economy of essentials, a mature refinement of craftsmanship and a unique vision.
W. Gordon Smith. Scotland on Sunday 5.2.95
Open Eye Gallery Exhibition
Neil Dallas Brown has four canvases shaped like ripples with a beautiful, transparent surface, the movement of the tides but disturbingly anthropomorphic too.
Duncan Macmillan The Scotsman 2.9.96
Kirkaldy Museum and Art Gallery Exhibition
These works are not simply colour fields for their own sake. Combined with gradients of texture they become explorations and evocations of the tidal processes of the sea in relation to sand, silt, shore and sky. To further emphasise these dynamic inter- relationships Neil Dallas Brown has shaped his canvases as though the moon itself were tugging at them. There is a spiritual engagement in these works which adds to their presence by its understatement.
Murdo Macdonald Statement on Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design Exhibition
By using varying shapes, some cleanly geometric, others positively curvaceous, he acknowledges the sculptural forces of the elements and adds a further dimension to their effect through the shadows they cast on the gallery wall. But they take us a step further. A sense of a different way of seeing particular vistas is brilliantly opened up for us.
John di Folco The Scotsman 3.11.97
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design Exhibition
This could be Scottish landscape painting of the future. A minimal paired down response to a big natural world, a world too often shrunk by Hollywood-cum-Highland epics and biscuit tins. The show is one man’s meditation. A relaxed, spacious celebration of a familiar environment.
Paul Welsh. The List 30.1.98
Glasgow School of Art Exhibition
2000s
He makes the important distinction that his paintings are not of the sea, but about it, about the power and beauty of it and its elemental effects, seen through his own temperament and from his own viewpoint. He is also strongly influenced by music and relishes the description of some of his works by a viewer as ‘visual music’.
The Fiona Interview The Courier and Advertiser 13.7.01
The opening show is devoted to 14 new pieces by Scottish artist Neil Dallas Brown whose recent and in-frequently exhibited works have for the past six years become increasingly economic, distilled and abstract. Now making use of shaped panels, a growing structuralist approach has emerged that is both reminiscent of and unashamedly referential to the post-painterly abstraction of the Sixties.
John di Folco Artwork May/June 2002
Randolph Gallery Exhibition