Chip Neville, MFA - Artist/Musician
Biography
Chip Neville is a seasoned educator, musician, and visual artist. His work covers a diverse set of topics ranging from humor to politics with an emphasis on local environmental issues. He worked for over 40 years as a print based graphic designer and extensively during that time as an illustrator for the State of Florida, and in children’s educational publishing creating more than twenty internationally published, award winning children’s books.
As a traditional and new media artist he works with local art organizations such as the Salvador Dali Museum, and The Tampa Museum of Art. He has exhibited work at film festivals and galleries locally and across the country showing animation, photography, and video installation combined with musical and thematic performance.
Musically Chip is owner of Chip Neville LLC, Dolphin Pardt Records and has a new release of original music Flatlander: Songs From The Wild Of Florida. He has toured with the Florida Orchestra in choral focused concerts, performed music with the Tampa Artist and Writer's Group, Tampa Bay Composer’s forum, and performs locally as a singer songwriter, and a guitarist. He also teaches guitar, bass and music theory lessons privately.
While active in the local music and arts community, Chip has recently been working as a professor focused on illustration and digital media for the University of Tampa in Film, Animation, and New Media department. During his almost 30 years of teaching, he has also been on the faculties of the St. Petersburg College in the digital media department, Art Institute of Tampa, the International Academy of Design and Technology in support of multiple departments, and the University of South Florida in the Community Music Division.
Artist’s Statement
The title bar of my web page says “Artist/Musician.” This is a confirmation of the interdisciplinary nature of my creative practice. My graduate degree in Visual art and my BA in Music creates the circumstances that allowed me a solid proficiency in both visual and aural aspects of digital media. This gives me greater awareness of the inherent possibilities in a creative work and how that can influence an audience.
The themes in my work tend mostly towards cultural critique, and advocacy for environmental issues through humor and allegory. I frequently synthesize my surroundings into reflections or commentary on my experiences. Visually, I am very fond of figure ground reversal, hidden imagery, and optical effects. I tend towards abstraction with strong color and rich textures. In my installation work, I employ a wide variety of medium ranging from metal and wood sculpture to optics, electronics, and mechanical details.
Musically, I compose, perform, and do all my own postproduction. Much like my approach to the visual arts, I work with abstraction, as in the electronic duo Dream Marina, and more objectively, and the contemporary to classic rock band Echo Pulse. My most recent efforts are in the singer songwriter genre with Dolphin Phardt Records new release Flatlander, Songs From The Florida Wild. The reductive nature and potential for intimacy with the listener is what I find the most compelling.
I find many things I do creatively are to achieve a balance, like adding audio to my visual art in animation. My use of digital technology for music and visual work is balanced by pursuing traditional methods such as observational drawing and playing classical guitar. I find balance in combining the visual of film with its audio, and the music album with its visual accompaniments. Ultimately there is no separation between what I do musically, visually, or sculpturally. Being diverse in my interest has afforded me a unified view and approach to creativity in the arts. I see all the arts (dance, music, sculpture, print, film, etc.), using the same language and having basically the same goal. That goal is to communicate more than a word, more than a look. A concept so sublime that the only effective expression of it is through the various arts utilizing aural, visual, and physical techniques to communicate with its’ audience.
