Dip AD (BA Hons) Painting (BA Hons) Sculpture, HDAD (MA) Painting
John Moores Scholarship, studied in Italy
Lectured in Painting for twenty five years at Chelsea College of Art, London
Indebted to fellow painters Simon Willis and Ken Kiff
Lives & works in the Wye Valley and Isle of Man
Gallery Artist - Kapil Jariwala Gallery, New Burlington Street, London
Culture Gallery, Broadway, New York
Artwavewest, Dorset. Courtyard, Hereford. Bootle Art Gallery. Liverpool. Arts in Mann, Isle of Man. Martins Gallery, Cheltenham.
Two Man Shows with Simon Willis, Bedford Way Gallery London and Sylvia Goth, Bluecoat Chambers Liverpool
Represented in the collection of Isle of Man National Gallery, painting Sea Cross. news
Group Shows in Public Galleries: Birmingham City, Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Whitworth Manchester, Undercroft Manchester, Royal Festival Hall, Camden, London Castlefield Manchester, Oosterkirk Amsterdam, Museum Werft Kronhout Amsterdam,
Private Galleries: Dijhstra Gallery Amsterdam, Martin’s International Cheltenham
Introduction by Ken Kiff (to Edward Kelly's 1987 exhibition "Island Paintings" London)
Edward Kelly's paintings are hard won images. Kelly understands that nature is unconventional and the demands nature makes on his art often contradict any consistency the painter could depend on. What fascinates Kelly is why should Cronk-Nv-Arrey-Laa shrouded in sweltering heat and sea mist have a greater sense of reality when rendered in pure turquoise, whilst the colour of the sea on a bracing day at Scarlett point has to be precise in colour. Why days of studying relationships of shapes should be sacrificed to a fleeting play of sunlight.
Introduction by Kapil Jariwala
Edward Kelly's paintings come from the land and the sea. His paintings are specific to the Isle of Man and the River Wye outside his studio in Herefordshire, and though he is familiar with both places he doesn't make a likeness of them. The involvement with his landscape is total. The sense of vertigo, weight and gravity are paramount arising out of a passion for walking in the mountains. The paintings have to be seen in the context of Modernism rather than the tradition of English landscape painting. Kelly acknowledges Cubism and American Abstract Expressionism as major influences but he would also stress the importance Piero della Francesca still has. One detects the presence of the Cornish painters, especially Nicholson and Lanyon, their balance of construction and painterly panache. What is certain is a particularly English concern with a style that is generated whilst working directly from observation. Kelly doesn't need literary references but harnesses natural forces.
Edward Kelly makes paintings. The importance of process is evident in the building up of the painting through layering. During the execution of the work he uses paper cut outs to try out shapes and determine their place in the composition. This engages a playfulness which allows change and possibility. Though he never sticks collage onto the canvas the sharp quality of edge and line remains. One might even say that in Kelly's work there is a notion of the fixed and the transient. These qualities provide tensions which ask us to consider the emblems or signs as masses moving or resting in space.
In the painting Flight, where the intervals and sizes of shapes and masses and the crucial spaces in between them allow the painting to 'breathe' and 'form', Kelly achieves a sense of scale through the expansiveness of the canvas. This conscious manipulation of the fabric of the painting indicates a desire to tap its natural resources, as if the meaning of the work runs concurrently with its plastic attributes - a meeting of subject and method. Kelly says, "in these paintings the narrative is found in mid-course".
The use of organic forms alongside an undulating and shifting ground recalls the work of painters who were influenced by Dada and especially by experiments in imagery coming out of automatic drawing, particularly Gorky, Pollock, Miro and Calder. The stream of imagery in their work added an energy that wasn't tied down to a narrative. Indeed Pollock's paint denies forms a solidity, stressing instead the fluid-liquidity of ideas. This same molten quality is present in Kelly's recent work, Island to Ireland and Whoosh where the iconography and paint take on the nature of land and sea, achieving through layering of marks and strokes parallel shifts which obliterate and reveal the undercurrent.
These 'streams of signs' can be related to the notion of dredging from a subconscious. In Kelly's work these elements have a tangible and assertive presence reminiscent of the Surrealists in the awkward way they are juxtaposed. But this isn't the Surrealism of Slash and Sutherland, of landscape as a stage for strange happenings. These ideas are analogous to a central concern - landscape or more precisely, the land and the sea and where they meet and overlap. The opaque and the transparent. These aspects are addressed by Kelly in the treatment of the painting's surface, where the soft fluid marks vie with the tooled cast shapes on the canvas. The effect is exhilarating.
On another level these paintings are still lifes, in the way elements are isolated, tilted to the picture plane, posed and given an abjectness. Indeed they have an intense presence in the flow of the painting. One is reminded of Cezanne's manipulation of the objects in his still lifes so that they complied with the structure of the picture. Cezanne often surprises our eye by refusing to follow form with his brush, deliberately building up a network or brickwork of brush strokes that relate the surface to the edges of the canvas and not the gesture of the objects. He 'opened up' the object so that it was more than just an incident on the journey across the picture. With Kelly the idea of these paintings as still life seems appropriate in the Context of 'studio' painting, where the painter controls or choreographs the canvas away from the tyranny of nature! In the studio the rational is dominant, where art is made from art and where the artist looks to the painting to paint the painting.