"She looks like a blonde Miss World finalist and paints like a jaded academic. I think of Drell as a born illustrator and a born painter, an artist for whom, by her very nature, academic studies and plaster drawing are ideal - an exceptionally rare quality among artists of her age."

-Harry Liivrand

Nelly Drell is young, but she has shown astonishing determination in making herself into the kind of artist she wants and needs to be. What fascinates here is the appearance of things - of people and places - as they truly are, not as they might seem to be in the artist's fantasy. She amplified initial training in Estonia with further studies in the United States, where a powerful realist tradition continues to exist. She is clearly fascinated by technical skills now largely lost to most contemporary artists.

-Edward Lucie-Smith

"She is able to mould an image even with the most erratic of brush strokes, lend it depth with the gentle tempering of tonalities, and what is most important - bestow on the image a sense of well-heeled cogency. Drell does not obfuscate her visions in a tactful or delicate artistic fog: she paints them with a pitiless honesty."

-Johannes Saar