‘Painting’, says Neve, ‘is a process of finding out, and landscape can be its thesis.’ What he is writing is not quite art history: it is about images, about landscape and about thought. Over the years, he was able to have discussions with many of the thirty or so artists he focused on, the motivation for the book having come from his talks with Ben Nicholson; and he has engrossed himself in their work, their countryside, their concepts. Because he is a painter himself, and an expert on 20th-century art, Neve is well outfitted for such a journey. Few writers have expressed more clearly the mixture of motives, emotions, unconscious influences and contradictions which conclude in the creative act of painting. (Cranleigh Magazine, 2021)