photos by dkellyphotography.com

 

 

I grew up in Manhattan with summers at my family’s 18th century barn house on the eastern end of Long Island. Both environments are richly embedded in my being, affecting all my artwork for the past 25 years.

Having a natural & innate propensity for art, I inevitably gravitated towards it. I drew my entire life finding my subject matter in the faces of friends and relatives or the corners of my home practicing and perfecting the rendering of whatever I saw. Then when I was in my late 20’s I decided to treat myself to what seemed almost exotic; oil painting lessons. I immediately discovered color and art buyers immediately discovered me as an expressive, passionate colorist.

 

At first, while naive and new to painting, in order to be “painterly” I distorted the images I painted. Although I was actually exploring color, my subject matter was definitely rough and not refined.

 

I painted like this, in this naïve style, for about 10 years until my teacher from an advanced oil painting class encouraged me to go back to my drawings, refine them and keep my images genuine. I soon realized that the more defined my images were, the freer I was able to be with my backgrounds. I realized that the fundamental aspect of art, drawing, was essential to the open ended freedom of expression I seemed to be bursting to explore with my art.

 

It also was becoming apparent that formal structure and refinement in all things was what I needed to express myself with complete freedom. Studying art history through my advanced oil painting class and books on art as well as regular museum and gallery visits were satiating my soul. My grammar and high school education at the elite Chapin School in New York presented me with a formality of culture that became ingrained in me; became truly a part of her. And my college, Trinity College in Hartford, CT with its excellence in education, its caliber in the world of small liberal arts colleges, its genuine beauty as an architecturally exquisite campus with pristine landscaping and the presence of history everywhere – all of that became a part of me, deep down.

 

“I carry these things with me as I paint every single painting from beginning to end. I carry these things with me as I draw each drawing seeking the line or the gesture or the shape or the mood that will inspire me to do a painting.”

 

So it seems that for me all that is my education from grammar school through college along with all that is the study of different movements in Art History, as well as the superiority of New York City itself and the privilege of consistent time spent on Long Island’s eastern end is all the structure from which all my artwork stems. “And, having “that structure” in my back pocket and always knowing that it’s there has allowed me to be free to express myself through different series in my art.”

 

With the shift to attention on my actual drawings, I started painting paintings of a solitary object in an abstract background. I did this for quite some time with my figures becoming more and more refined while my backgrounds were becoming more abstract. Then after a very snowy winter in New York and so a beautiful, overflowing spring that followed, I was moved by all the trees I was noticing everywhere. I painted these trees in the same way I had been painting the solitary objects, “feeling at first that the expression of these trees was going to be limitless. They were very exciting to me. They were organic; each one was different from another. They reached up. They bowed down and so on.” But in exploring these trees, I tried something I had never done before; I abstracted them. I started to take away what I had originally put down and then add to it over and over until I had successfully arrived at the expression of the emotion behind it all.

 

It seemed then that my life truly changed. I thought and lived as I painted. I started to let the world happen and guided it gently and creatively rather than trying to control it all. And, I was willing to let things go that I fiercely held onto before, even if I thought I needed them because now I knew that the big picture was possible to work even better with all new things in it. And, it was at this point that I really felt, “there is no turning back. I could only be an artist from here on in.” My work and my life had completely come together.

 

Following these abstract landscapes, I have painted several different series that naturally evolved one into another. I painted abstract Still Life paintings where the flat picture plane and varying perspectives as in Cubism were explored. I then simplified these abstract Still Life paintings and focused on a series of “Tools” as my subject matter, with color as always my true subject and a focus on the essence of those tools as revealed through the paint application, color and form.

 

From “Tools” I then went to “Tools with Fruit” which led me to a series of just “Fruit.” In painting the fruit, as with the tools, I used the paint application, color and form to express the essence of fruit to me; its lusciousness, roundness, dripping, sweet nature.

 

So, what would be next? I was at a point where I had to think of what would be even more round, more luscious, more sensuous, and deeper than fruit and the expression of fruit. I realized then that the perfect candidate to explore with all this new knowledge was the Human Form.

 

So the Human Form became my next and now current series. The Human Form is a subject matter I first experimented with many, many years ago when I first started painting. I painted individual people in my early, naïve style. And, I painted individual people as a solitary object in an abstract background. Now, though, I am coming to it with all the knowledge and experience of having gone so much past those early periods. I am coming to it having experimented with and experienced abstraction. I am coming to it having created paintings that successfully hover between Abstraction and Representation. I am coming to it having studied so much Art History. And, I am coming to it having arrived at a place of genuine appreciation for the elements in my life’s journey that are my backbone, my “structure.” And it is all of these things that give me the freedom and confidence to express myself with the emotionally stimulating and thought provoking color journeys that signify my art.