EP.3 Michael Shane Neal Undraped(AUDIO)

Since beginning a full time career as an artist at the age of 21, Michael Shane Neal has completed more than 500 commissioned portraits on display around the world. His portraits include Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, former Secretary of Interior Dirk Kempthorne, former President George H.W. Bush, 9th Baronet and Laird of Luss, Scotland Sir Malcolm Colquhoun, former U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Rivkin, U.S. Senators Arlen Specter, Robert C. Byrd, and Bill Frist, Federal Chief Judge Anthony Scirica, and actor Morgan Freeman.

https://www.michaelshaneneal.com/

Receiving his B.A. from Lipscomb University, Neal also studied at the Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts, The Scottsdale Artist School, Lyme Academy of Art, and he is a protégé of America’s most celebrated figurative and portrait painter, Everett Raymond Kinstler. Neal’s work has been featured in publications such as American Artist, International Artist, The Artist’s Magazine, Art News, Fine Art Connoisseur, and Nashville Arts Magazine. He has received numerous awards for landscape and figurative paintings as well as the Grand Prize Award from the Portrait Society of America in 2001.

Neal is the chairman of the board of the Portrait Society of America. He has also served on the board of directors of the American Patrons for the National Library and Galleries of Scotland (APNLGS), the board of trustees for The Andrew Jackson Foundation, the Executive Board of Trustees for Cheekwood Museum of Art, and as a member of the Norman Rockwell Museum’s National Council. He is a member of the Allied Artists of New York, the Artist Fellowship of New York, the Salmagundi Club, the Lotos Club, the Century Association, the Sloane Club of London, the Cumberland Society of Painters, the Economic Club of Nashville, and an Exhibiting Artist member of the National Arts Club in New York, among others.

Neal, the father of two daughters, enjoys church and community outreach, golf, plein-air painting, travel, and reading with a particular interest in history.