Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly.
Kelly, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My father was in the Airforce so when I was two, we moved to Italy then Germany until moving to Charleston for high school and college at CofC. I started drawing adamantly when I was four and never stopped, I think part of that was living off base in a foreign country I didn’t speak the language of. Drawing was an outlet from an early age to live in a dream world of my own making and sort through my emotions and thoughts when I got older helping me make sense of new experiences and people. I was planning on attending the Air Force Academy but senior year of high school I got into AP art with my own portfolio and never looked back, I was chasing my passion.
That urge in me to do what my gut is telling me when it may not make sense or seem realistic to others has never stopped and has greatly impacted how my art has grown. My first painting class with Cliff Peacock who I credit to teaching me how to capture light and balance a piece to entice my audience I was so very out of my league, but I loved how the oils moved and how the brush slowly became an extension of my hand. I took all but one of my painting classes up through independent study with Cliff and learned so much from his style of teaching. I adore sculpting as well, its highly soothing but visceral with your hands actively molding the mediums, my favorite was clay, rather than having the brush between you and the canvas. Bill Dunlap, our juror for one of the young contemporaries shows at The Halsey put me in touch with John Casey out in Oakland, California on a collaborative show.
I got in and a book of the show “Hands and Pants” was published which gave me the confidence to start approaching show applications and selling my work. Casey later commissioned my favorite kind of ask “paint me whatever you’re feeling in this moment”. Those always come out stronger because the client is trusting me to exorcise my craft. Ones where they give me a general outline of the ideas driving the piece and we collaborate on a final image that works in my eyes as a painter and inspires the client come out strong as well if anyone reading is wanting to commission a piece from any artist, trust them like you would a lawyer, they accept commissions for their skill and knowledge in our field,
My gut again was screaming at me to go explore where I grew up so at twenty-seven after a few years of saving money I backpacked Europe for a year. I spent the majority of my time in museums I’d only ever learned about in art history with Professor Gaudi who instructed beautifully. She taught us how to identity any piece’s art movement and time frame rather than focusing in on specific artist’s lineages of a period. The first museum I was lucky enough to visit was The Tate Modern that happened to have a Picasso retrospective.
I cried an ugly cry when I went outside to just sit with what I had seen to the point a stranger came to check on me. I had never been moved in that way, feeling such levity, hope, and a nice tinge of bittersweet pain. I think a lot of creatives thrive on that, art does reflect life and vice versa so that means embracing the beauty and light with all the inner shadows you explored and learned to love to get there, to feel that flow consuming you when you work and time isn’t real in that headspace. Exploring Europe and the UK, being off the grid with my phone for a year, wandering the street to follow whatever architectural marvel or quaint neighborhood street caught my eye altered my core. I had a confidence in me that was new and strong and didn’t seek approval for my work but allowed me to just exist and make what I felt was important for myself and society to acknowledge.
I moved to London the next year and spent two years there teaching while working with musicians on album covers. Most closely with Spiritual Records in Camden with exclusively grass roots artists including Kevin Davy White, Jack Trouble, Dom Glynn, William Poyer, Amy and the Calamites, Ann Liu Cannon, Tommy Hare, and Bandini. It was ideal, I’d go to their gigs, listen to their albums walking around this dream of a city and paint or draw what my mind’s eye was forming from the lyrics and melodies. Covid sent me back to America as I’d lost my visa, but I was determined to continue growing creatively so I landed in Brooklyn.
I didn’t know I could love a city more than London until I started walking the streets of New York, you can feel the pulse of the city everywhere with the underlying go go go mentality to some degree unconscious because it’s the norm there and that matched my speed. Brooklyn is so colorful by nature, very free spirited with ample levels of hustle to fortify those dreams. I was booking more shows than before because my personal messages and delivery style made sense to the client base there. It grew just as I’d hoped for because I found a community of like-minded people and we were all feeding off of each other’s ambition and ideas,
I strictly paint women now for five years in my own body of work. Most of the portraits have some element of surrealism and portray the impossible archetypes forced on us to live up to or is very deep and personal spiritual work in relation to consciousness and how we fit into the universe as humans. I create with the question in my mind of how can I help women feel empowered to be unapologetically strong in themselves, speak kindly internally, and my biggest goal is to help women who feel lost trying to be something they really don’t want to be hear their own wisdom that comes with moving through an unfortunately still patriarchal society. We are all lucky enough to have a certain strength of intuition that is often dulled by trying to succeed within limiting expectations. Be ambitious but not a threat, always be kind and control your words in the face of disrespect, achieve an impossible body while creating life and growing in your feminine power, have opinions but only about things society deems appropriate for you to speak up about. It’s exhausting, frustrating, and severely damaging our collective experience as a species, the cages, names, and limitations women are expected to be thankful for. You don’t have to be thankful, your allowed to be angry and take action to create change now.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No, it certainly has not been a smooth road but I’m thankful for that in many aspects of my life. Hearing “n0” hundreds of times and not losing resilience knowing that my work is strong trained my mind in so many ways to never stop till I reach any of my many goals. Creatively it’s mostly about discovering your target market to actual turn a profit. You learn that by taking every opportunity that is a yes, taking in the people that are admiring and more importantly the ones purchasing. The trick for a long game is not internalizing what you see your audience likes. I had trouble with that when I was around twenty-four and it really took the passion out of creating because I was making what I thought would see rather than what I needed to explore for my own spirit. That never ends well and is how artists stop growing I believe.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I specialize in spiritual portraiture, exclusively of women exploring the divine feminine while questioning social norms and historic archetypes. When a piece starts it’s typically inspired by a song. I get obsessed with two or three tracks that capture what I’m sorting through in my own psyche and gives me a way to relate what I’m processing in a way that will hopefully translate universally. I paint the entire first piece listening to those three songs on repeat feeling the lyrics take shape visually with a color palette inspired by the melodies. I prefer to work in series to make a cohesive body digging into the emotions and hand ending up with triptychs or my largest has been twelve series piece portraying relationship dynamics via animal heads on human bodies and their language in relation to each other, I’m very proud of a nine piece Chakra series I did embellishing on the throat and crown chakras as well as a spirit animal seven piece series. My favorite standalone painting is called “Mother’s Day” portraying a Native American woman and her generational relationship to the earth and spirit realm.
What are your plans for the future?
I’ve just been accepted to The Citadels Graduate Phycology program which begins this January and am very excited to become a practicing clinician. I’m currently illustrating a psychological workbook for new or expecting mothers being published through Wildflower Center for Counseling in Mount Pleasant. I did a few chakra workshops with their MUM’s group and immediately wanted a career shift from teaching students to helping adults heal. That’s what I’ve always aimed for my art to do, guide others to be introspective and inspire women to be true to and want more for themselves.
After graduating my long term plan is to practice psychology back in Brooklyn while continuing to apply for shows and grants in a city that appreciated my work like none other, I’ve encountered thus far.
Pricing:
- commission’s start at $1,000
- originals cost between $500-$1000
- Prints of originals are available for $30-$50
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kmacstudios.net/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kmacstudios_
