Roman Courtyard (Via Garibaldi, Rome), Meridith McNeal, 2023, watercolor on paper, 85 x 61 in. / 215.9 x 154.94 cm.

Inside Outside: Liminal Spaces in McNeal’s Urban Landscapes

December 2, 2025 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Roman Courtyard (Via Garibaldi, Rome), Meridith McNeal, 2023, watercolor on paper, 85 x 61 in. / 215.9 x 154.94 cm.

Meridith McNeal’s Inside Outside series transforms everyday architectural thresholds into meditative portals, windows, doors, and reflective glass that blur boundaries between interior structure and the living world just beyond.

Meridith McNeal creates luminous watercolor works exploring windows, doors, and reflections, blending architecture, memory, and the natural world with poetic clarity.

Through monumental watercolor works rooted in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and Rome, McNeal uses transparency, distortion, and luminous natural light to reveal how spaces hold memory. These three works, Inside Outside Recovery, Inside Outside Gated Doors, and Inside Outside Artemisia, offer a quiet but powerful study of place, perception, and the emotional charge of looking outward.

Explore our curated selection of contemporary artists from around the globe.

Naturalist Gallery offers artist representation internationally. Apply your art.

Inside Outside Recovery, Ceramics Studio (Clinton Hill Bklyn), Meridith McNeal. 2022. watercolor on paper, 91 x 70 in. / 231.14 x 177.8 cm.

In Inside Outside Recovery, McNeal captures a ceramics studio emptied of activity, its stools inverted, its tools at rest. The stillness intensifies the vibrant forest scene unfurling through the arched windows: twisting branches, layered greens, and diffuse sunlight. The contrast between industrial interior, battered floorboards, radiator, stacked stools, and the organic liveliness outside amplifies the sensation of renewal embedded in the title. McNeal’s watercolor technique heightens this duality: crisp, fine-lined architecture frames looser, fluid passages of foliage. The painting reads as a quiet testimony to recovery, creative pause, and the promise of re-entry.

Inside Outside Gated Doors (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn), Meridith McNeal, 2023, watercolor on paper, 68 x 44 in. / 172.72 x 111.76 cm.

This work centers on an ornate wrought-iron gate, rendered with meticulous linear precision. Against the bright expanse of blue sky, the gate becomes both barrier and ornament, a threshold whose openness depends entirely on one’s perspective. Shadows of bare branches curl across the surface like inscriptions, while architectural details behind the bars appear softened, nearly dreamlike. McNeal uses the vertical format to emphasize ascension and aspiration, allowing the viewer’s eye to climb through the iron scrollwork. What could read as confinement instead becomes an invitation to step forward, examine, and pass through.

Inside Outside Artemisia (Piazza Navona, Rome), Meridith McNeal, 2023, watercolor on paper, 61 x 45 in. / 154.94 x 114.3 cm.

Set in Rome, Inside Outside Artemisia reflects a façade across a tall, narrow window whose panes subtly warp the scene. Columns bend, walls tilt, and architectural logic becomes fluid, suggesting the shifting nature of memory, travel, and cultural inheritance. The muted palette of warm stone and cool shadow reinforces a sense of timelessness, while the classical detailing hints at the layers of history embedded in the city. The painting captures not the fixed reality of a place, but the lived experience of perceiving it: a moment of recognition altered by movement, angle, and reflection.

Across these works, McNeal treats windows and doors as emotional and historical cross-sections, liminal spaces where interior contemplation meets external reality. Whether facing Brooklyn’s trees or Rome’s ancient stonework, the viewer encounters the same poetic tension: what we see is shaped by where we stand. McNeal’s Inside Outside series invites us to linger at that threshold, absorbing the textures of place while considering the shifting borders between memory, architecture, and the natural world.

Learn more About Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art.