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FOREWORD

This exhibition is a thirty-stanza poem about a village of twelve hundred souls with whom Lloyd Ney is so fully identified that years ago he ceased to be a denizen of another world come to spy upon them - as Yeats upon the fisherfolk of Aran, Synge upon the Irish peasantry, as most artists in capitalist states spy upon and lie about the workers. Long ago the exteriors of Ney's neighbors ceased to clamor for his comment; the scenes of the village have become fused with his subconscious and he no longer observes the obvious; the actual has become the dream, of which he reports the essential in the simplest manner, using Nature and medium as the servants of creative impulse.

As you go about the village you see his work related to the lives of the people. In Joe Reading's news-stand are three Ney murals. In the high school hangs a Ney canvas presented by a class of seniors. In the Matthews boys' beer saloon hangs a watercolor. In Watson Roberts' real estate office hangs a drawing. Over Dick Wedderspoon's garage entrance is a Ney tympanum. And Jake Hull, the village huckster, hawks fruit and vegetables in a pushcart Ney decorated.

To those who call his work fantastic, Ney replies that it is the only realism he knows, the reality of dynamic color notes that throb like the chords of a violin, the reality of color that saves motive from banality by clothing it in a vibrating integument that you cannot strip from it to identify and convert subject into anecdote and thus translate poetry into prose.
 
Ney is wise enough to mistrust the intellect, which begets theories, but not art.

Bruce Lockwood


TITLES OF PAINTINGS
1. "Pop" Bush's Porch
2. Cement Bridge
3. Canal
4. Street Scene
5. Barge Party
6. Gravel Pit
7. Father Fleming
8. Railroad Station
9. Towpath
10. Happy and Greeny
11. Swimming
12. Girl
13. Boy
14. Coal Yard
15. Outhouse Fire
16. Mechanic Street
17. Main Street
18. Along the Canal No. 1
19. Red House
20. Flowers
21. Brown's Mill
22. Church
23. Worthington's Garage
24. Landscape
25. Along the Canal No. 2
26. Horse and Wagon
27. Whitewashed Fence
28. Dillon's House
29. Bridge
30. Playhouse