Neil Lavey was born in New York City and grew up in Dobbs Ferry, a small town in Westchester County on the banks of the Hudson River. He graduated from Cooper Union art college in New York in 1981, and worked in advertising for twelve years before concentrating on his art, which includes drawing, painting, sculpture and photography.

Lavey’s teachers and mentors include Reuben Kadish, Hans Haake, Stephen Rogers Peck, Robert Beverly Hale and DC comic book artist Irv Novick. He has taught drawing classes at the Ramsey Adult School and Sleepy Hollow Middle School, and teaches privately at his studio in Dobbs Ferry, where he works and lives with his husband Gorden Guelker-Lavey.

His work has been exhibited in The Leslie Lohman Gallery and The Sacred Body Arts Gallery in New York City, as well as the ICON gallery and the Ron Fowler Galleries in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He has also had work exhibited at the Rockland Center for the Arts, The Edward Hopper House, The Blue Door Gallery in Yonkers, and the Upstream Gallery in Hastings on Hudson.

In recent years, maybe not coincidentally since he found a partner and his favourite location near the river, Neil Lavey has concentrated more on landscapes, though still sometimes produces powerful images of male-to-male bonding.

Neil Lavey’s website can be found here, and his Facebook page here.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for introducing us to the work of this artist, and for supplying most of the images.