Sucked Up employs a wide range of painterly techniques to create a field of suction, a swirling vortex into which everything on the work’s surface is dragged. Neel consciously engages with the history of painting, working with a palette knife, brush and oil paint to flick, drip and smear alternate areas of thick impasto and relative opacity. Still images from video games, plucked from the internet and sieved by the artist’s imagination, are at the work’s origin. “I paint from a landfill scattered and layered with fragments of our culture,” Neels states.