Kevin Kelly

Selling some archival prints of this piece to raise $ for upcoming art endeavors. 5"x7" $15, venmo . Message me, and I will send one your way!
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Original painting:
"Local Flavor"
acrylic on handmade paper mounted to canvas
36"x54"

Selling some archival prints of this piece to raise $ for upcoming art endeavors. 5"x7" $15, venmo . Message me, and I will send one your way!
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Original painting:
"Haunt"
acrylic on paper mounted to canvas
47"x35"

Excited to place about 15 paintings in One Main Plaza in Kansas City through the curation services for the next six months. If you are near the Plaza, pop into 4435 Main st (next to the Marriott) to see a variety of works.
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Selling some archival prints of this piece to raise $ for upcoming art endeavors. 5"x7" $15, venmo Kevin Kelly. Message me, and I will send one your way!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Original painting:
"Haunt"
acrylic on paper mounted to canvas
47"x35"

I remember my undergraduate art history classes very clearly. This was a time of chronological instruction, slide carousel, lectures in a dark hall with a glowing screen. My notes were mostly quick gestural sketches. It's easy for me to get nostalgic about these times because they authentically shifted my brain. I was hungry for these stories. I didn't feel like I was memorizing facts, I felt like I was discovering long lost relatives. These artists didn't feel dead-they were men and women trying to solve the same problems I was puzzling over, trying to tap into mysteries that I only perceived vaguely. I came from a big, dysfunctional family, so I was eager for this deeper level of connection. All these years later, my understandings of art history and relationships have grown more nuanced. Even with a more established sense of self, I am still always looking for "bookends" to figure out where I fit. Probably always will.
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"Bookends"
egg tempera and grease pencil on vellum
36"x24"

Selling some archival prints of this piece to raise $ for upcoming art endeavors. 5"x7" $15, venmo . Message me, and I will send one your way!
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Original painting:
"Bait and Switch"
acrylic on paper mounted to canvas
30"x38"

Selling some archival prints of this piece to raise $ for upcoming art endeavors. 8"x10" $20, venmo . Message me, and I will send one your way!

Are you more of a lyrics person or a music person? Is this a false dichotomy? Where do you begin investigating the meaning of a song? I know that I endlessly quote song lyrics to/at my wife, and that she often requests music without words (she has a particular aversion to emotive female vocalists that I find a little confusing). Anyway, I can easily draw comparisons between how I process music to how I process paintings. It is tempting to want to know the story behind what a painting means (signs, symbols, characters, props, setting, etc.). When reading a painting, I do try to focus first on what a painting is doing to me (emotionally, vibrationally, etc.). It's a more expansive and open-ended question. By extension, I try to relax these boundaries when making a painting- allowing the subject and the form to stay porous and soft as I am building layers. In practice this means working from ambiguous sources (often collages or composites of images), injecting change along the way (sketching throughout the process), and working with unpredictable materials. After all, I want to be surprised by a painting just as much as an outside viewer desires connection and novelty.
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"Worrywort"
colored paper pulp on recycled denim moving blanket
52"x38"

Easy or not, summer time is often a period of expanded reflection for me. Lately I have been thinking a lot about the origins of certain anxieties, the cumbersome weight associated with them, how certain programming gets handed down generationally. These are all second half of life questions- how to awaken to the hard things, find new paths forward, moving aware but lighter in the world. Fun stuff! Anyway, I'm lucky to have people in my life that regularly remind me to stay positive and even optimistic.
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"Worrywort"
grease pencil and egg tempera on vellum
36"x24"

I sometimes talk with my students about being in the studio as either "pulling weeds" or "doing sudoku." It's a good way to ground the conversation about painting, which is often misunderstood or romanticized. In one mode, we are engaged in the chores of painting- stretching canvas, gessoing a surface, even making studies. Although, "pulling weeds" is not always about preparation. Plenty of times, the middle of a paintings process can feel like a slog, as you build tedious layers or cover false moves. This is different than "doing sudoku"- literally puzzling out the life of a painting. These are compositional issues, but also issues of content (since these are inseparable). I think of sudoku because I notice myself looking for patterns to emerge, not just an answer but a whole system of related answers. In short, this more cerebral work is about slowly building believability (can this/will this all work out)- a feeling I also experience in the middle of a complicated puzzle.

This painting is a fair balance of these two working modes, plenty of meticulous building and surprising shifts along the way. Both are necessary, both are humbling, and both expand possibilities.
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"I'm Sorry That You Feel That Way"
colored paper pulp on recycled denim moving blanket
52"x38"