Built up with layers of transparent acrylic paint they contain all the realism and stark reality that this mode of painting requires. And each painting breathes the air and stillness. The New Zealand romantic movement will not lie down and die while we have Neil Driver in our midst.
The Dominion
The paintings belong to the school of New Zealand artists whose realist subjects are heightened in effect by an intense clear light that gives the objects and the landscape a metaphysical significance and tries to load even a chair with meaning.
Auckland Herald
His echoing interiors, with their Morandi-ish still life and their arid vistas, belong with a New Zealand bleak school. This school favours a puritan depersonalisation of the scene, a surreal vacancy in the surroundings and a highly professional realist sheen on the painting.
The Evening Post
His skills are used to make images of the New Zealand dream, particularly the dream of a lovely colonial house with wooden floors, isolated near the sea or looking over a wide landscape of lonely hills. His paintings have no people in them but their presence is hinted at obliquely. This absence gives his world of sunlight outside and shadoes indoors an individual, dream like, surreal quality.
Auckland Herald 2 August 2007
