A Foreigner in a Strange Land

Let's play a psychic guessing game.  Think of all rock bands.  Now, think about the greatest rock band of all time.  Now think about yourself in middle school, wishing you could be in a rock band.  Now, blend all of this together, the highs and the lows, and come up with the most average rock band of all time.  This is a band that you have definitely heard of, you know they have had hits, in fact you hear them on the radio. Then you turn the station. You have never been motivated to buy an album by this band or see them in concert, nor do you know anyone who has.  You wonder who really likes/liked this band.  Concentrate on the name of this band.  Concentrate...okay!

You are thinking of Foreigner, aren't you.  Yes, you are.

Now, this exercise is not meant to be disrespectful to this English American rock group, formed in New York in 1976 (thanks wikipedia!).  Far from it.  Instead, I bring this up because Foreigner is a great example, I think, of the sad relationship between fame and the artist, or artists as it were.  Bear with me here. 

Not long ago, I was listening to the radio as I drove across town, and a Foreigner song came on.  A reflex brought my hand up to change the dial, because this band is on "the list".  I do not mean an actual written list.  I mean my wife and I, living in a town that has horrible choices on commercial radio ("Everything that rocks!", or "The rock you grew up with!", or "The biggest rock library in town!", or "The newest rock station in town!") have formed an informal mental list of artists that we agree not to listen to while we drive in the car.  Making it to "the list" could mean that an artist or band has stupid lyrics, has very sexist lyrics, has unimaginative musical arrangements,  or only has fans with confederate flags on their pickup trucks.  Now, "the list" can  have subtle rules that make interesting exceptions.  Sometimes being so far out of style and oblivious to your uncoolness can make you cool, like Poison.  And sometimes being too cheesy and earnest can make you great, like Journey. Anyway, as I sat there that day with my hand poised to flip the dial, it occurred to me that Foreigner was undoubtedly on "the list", but it was kind of sad that they were.  For a minute or so, I thought about the group as real guys with a real history. I considered the years of practicing, jamming, networking, auditioning, failing, soul searching, and finally recording and touring that each member had been through.  They were lucky, I guess, because they actually made it.  And then I thought about the phrase, "making it."  What does that mean for these artists, really?  I mean, all that work, all that persistence over all those years, and how many Foreigner songs can I name without checking wikipedia? Four, maybe five?  You could argue that the band was simply popular before my time since I was born in 1978, but that just makes it even sadder as it points out how short lived and fickle fame is.  Maybe it is precisely their pursuit of fame that has relegated this group of artists to such dullness, to such averageness, such blahness that they belong on "the list."  Maybe the pursuit of fame and the pursuit of art are necessarily very different things.  Maybe art should be a Foreigner to fame.  Maybe this why I had to change the station.

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

Time to Paint

The other night at dinner I was sneezing and sniffling, and I made an offhand comment like,"I hope I am not getting sick.  That's the last thing that I need right now."  This week was the week before finals, the most grueling week of the semester.  This year it has been mixed with an art exhibit for teachers, an art competition for my students, along with the normal end-of-term public school drama and a flurry of holiday activities. My sister-in-law was with us, and she suggested a medicine that would nip a cold in the bud if taken as soon as symptoms started to show.  My wife looked at me unsympathetically and said flatly, "he doesn't need medicine.  He just needs to paint."  As the mother of four kids, my wife is great at feeling out fevers, assessing digestive issues, and layering medicines to cover any number of maladies.  But my wife has also become an expert at my psychosis.  She knows that when I do not spend a certain number of hours per week in my studio, that I "get a certain way." Here are the symptoms:

• Clumsiness.  This is always an issue, but I manage to loose any portion of grace that I posses.  Plus, I also spontaneously invent swearing phrases that are embarrassing and do not make sense, like "Shit cakes!", or "Frick-riken!" This reminds me of my dad ("Dag-nabbit!")
• Irritability.  Like, to the point that I am scolding inanimate objects for not cooperating with some every day task, or saying things like, "why does gravity always have to work against me!"
• Distractabilty.  The details of things seem to evade me.  Also, I start to care less about putting small pieces together.  This is a surefire way to create hell in a high school classroom.  "Sure, you can go work out in the hallway with your friends.  Whatever."
• Self-centeredness.  Like talking back to the radio when Robert Siegel is interviewing a politician with an annoying point of view.  Like becoming very possessive of every minute of alone time.    Like paying  attention to every sneeze or sniffle.

This is the paradox of the art studio- if I spend a couple of hours per day steeped in my own mental space, caring only about those things that only I care about, I become so much more empathetic toward others.  If I zone out, wearing my ipod, and listen to loud, vulgar music like the Pixies, I am transformed into a calm and more lucid speaker.  If I hyper-concentrate on small, isolated tasks such as masking off a complicated shape or making just the right unpracticed-looking brushstroke, I can dance through a complicated day.  And even if  I am facing a very busy schedule, spending a couple of hours in my studio always means that I will get more school work, house work and relationship building done than if I gave those hours to more tasks. 

Isn't that a shit cake?

Please visit my work at kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

The Sublime of the Mundane

When I was a teenager, I used to collect and memorize Pink Floyd albums.  Yes, this is the third British rock group to be mentioned in this space, so far.  Pink Floyd, with their bluesy guitar licks and over-the-top-sad-white-boy lyrics, was probably my first real taste of that hard to define sublime feeling that is accessible for angsty, hormone filled teenagers that are sad about something, though they are not quite sure what, and can see depth and purity in anything deeper than themselves.   At that age, I could swell up to bursting by feeding on the emotional sap of albums like Dark Side of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, and of course, that magnum opus of self absorbed sadness The Wall.  It was as though I could take my own ill-defined senses of anger, longing, and tragedy, and hang them on every song, lyric, and note- even though my life was pretty stable, I was cared for, provided for, and had never been, say, a lunatic, or a crazy diamond, or the victim of abusive teachers.

As I have gotten older, my sense of the sublime has...changed.  "The real world" has a way of introducing you to a range of grand emotions and experiences that you never paid attention to as a teenager.  These days, I am moved by a profound sense of tragedy by simply taking in the sights and sounds of a Wal-Mart checkout line.  If I want to see the fragile relationship between beauty and revulsion I can study the color schemes of Taco Bell food.  If feelings of deep emptiness had a color palette, they would not just be black, like the wardrobe of black t-shirts I wore in middle and high school, but would be closer to the colors created by fluorescent light on acoustic tile.  Seriously, study these sickly, unnatural colors the next time you are sitting in an office or a hospital.  They are all the better/worse if they are in close proximity to a beige or mauve colored wall, maybe with faded floral prints framed on the wall.  Now, that is what I call comfortably numb.

Please visit my work at kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

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An Artist in Wichita

You know you are an artist in Wichita when:

• You find yourself wrapping a chair with masking tape at 3:30 am...on a Saturday.
• Your family wants to know when breakfast is, and you think "at 11:00 am I'll be ready to eat..."  You are still wrapping a chair in masking tape.
• That evening your family wants to hang out, eat some holiday chocolate, and watch your favorite TV show together.  You are busy filling old yogurt containers with sand, and wrapping a chair in masking tape.
• Your family wants to eat lunch with your in-laws on Sunday.  You have to now explain to your in-laws that you are wrapping a chair in masking tape, so you cannot come.  They are sweet people, so they send lunch over to you.  You now get to show them that you are wrapping a chair in masking tape.
• Your family is making christmas candy with your in-laws on Sunday afternoon, and entertaining a family friend.  He asks where you are.  Your wife has to explain that you are at home...wrapping a chair in masking tape.
• You take a break from the masking tape to attend a holiday concert with your family.  When you get home at 9:00 pm you say goodnight to your family so you can pack up two boxes of yogurt containers filled with sand and finish wrapping a chair in masking tape.
• Your low point for the weekend: your son asks when this weekend's weekend will come...
• Your lower point for the weekend: picking up the Arts section of your local paper to see front page coverage of a middle school student who invented a new hamburger for Red Robin...really...front page coverage...in the Arts section...
• Your high point for the weekend: wrapping a chair with masking tape.

Please visit my work at kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

From the Middle- Part 2

So, as I have previously stated, middle children are obviously the best children.  Unlike oldest children, who always feel entitled, we middle children understand that the only way to make something happen is with real effort.  And youngest children, always generating drama and pulling the spotlight to themselves, only generate work.  And only children, Aye!  Don't even get me started about only children!  But middle children, we are the peace makers, the unifiers, the harmonizers, the volunteers...really we are like  Mother Teresa, Jimmy Carter, and barbershop quartet singers all rolled into one.  Sure, we may not be glamorous or cool, but we keep the world from falling apart!  Grad school brought all of my understanding about these things to a sharp point, as I realized how much I relied on my central  position when, say, reaching for art imagery (from daily life- nothing to risky or controversial), or selected media ("how about wood scraps, high-school-grade acrylics and hot glue- I've got plenty of that already laying around"), or composed paintings ("I know it's pretty, I tried not to make it pretty, but it always comes out pretty!").  This was not good.  Art school is about turning your self loose to make waves.  I mean, Pablo Picasso was an oldest child, maybe the ultimate oldest child, the take-charge, because-I said-so-and-I-am-in-charge kind of oldest child.  And Jackson Pollock was a youngest child, the moody, dramatic, pour-your-soul-out-for-everyone-else-to-soak-up kind of youngest child.  I knew that I had to either accept that I would never make it as an artist, because I was programed to not make waves, or find a way to make waves from the center, from the middle, positioned in between, as it were.

And there was my answer.  I was not meant to make paintings of "real" things, and I was not meant to make "abstract paintings."  I was supposed to make paintings that were a little bit of both. I was not supposed to make the beautiful ugly or the ugly beautiful.  I was meant to take disparate items and to try to make them get along, to harmonize the situation, like Jimmy Carter.

And this all leads to today, painting a picture of chewing gum and a Beatles album, trying to make them get along.

P.S.-  So, I want to apologize and just try to smooth things over with my oldest son, my youngest son, my wife, who is a youngest child, her sister, who is an oldest child, my oldest sister, my youngest sister, my mom who is a youngest child, my dad who is an only child and my in laws, both oldest children.

Please visit my work at kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

From the Middle- Part 1

Graduate school was great therapy for me.  I know that critique sessions that lasted for up to four hours were torture for some, but I found them to be very revealing, but usually indirectly.  This was the cycle: spend 15-20 hrs a week alone in a filthy, cluttered space feeling pressed for time, deprived of sleep, listening to music loudly to drown out the internal voices that criticized my every move as stupid and derivative; try to make work that was personal, but not too personal, but definitely original; settle on making the work that I "felt" I must make by doing the things that "felt natural"; hang it up and pick it a part during a four hour session with people that I was sure were much, much smarter than me (except for the one or two that I knew were much, much dumber than everybody); realize that everything that "felt natural" to me was weird and confusing to everybody else; go back to my filthy, cluttered studio and turn up the music.  But every once in a while, usually when I was busy with some mundane duty, a tiny bump in the grinding cycle would jolt me awake. It was kinda like when I was a kid sitting in the front seat of the car without a seat belt, and I was busy looking at my hands, and my mom would brake too quickly, and I would hit my face on the dashboard.  Anyway, at these moments, the most profound and the most obvious insights would come, and I would receive some clue as to what I was supposed to be doing or thinking about as I was making art. 

One such moment came as I was driving back home from a grinding critique at Wichita State.  As I drove on auto pilot from the Northeast part of town toward my house, I was reflecting on my upbringing.  I am one of eight children, number 5 from the oldest.  Now, I have always known that middle children are the most well adjusted children, eager to do their part and to keep the peace.  It was great that I was able to study art and still stay close to my family.   Then it struck me, as I drove West on the highway toward home,  I was also studying painting from the middle, in Wichita Kansas, as opposed to, say, New York or L.A.  And then a strange sinking feeling pulled at my gut, as I turned South on Main street.  Not only was I a middle child, always eager not to make waves, and not only was I planted firmly in the center of the country, I was also living in the geographic center of the city.  And then, as I drove down my street, a strange buzz grew in my head.  Counting the houses on my block, mine was the center house.

Here was something to pay attention to.

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

Tracking the Right Brain- Part 3

So, a few weeks ago my son asked, "Dad?  How come you have never made a painting about gum?"  He is used to the way my brain works.  He knows that I pay very close attention to colors and textures, especially for seemingly insignificant items from daily life.  And gum is a part of daily life for my family.  We are pretty addicted, and not just the kids.  My wife and I are also known to carry around packs of our favorite flavors, ready to freshen up coffee breath, or roast beef breath, or whatever.  Mind you, this is sugar free stuff, fine for the teeth, but sweetened with mystery chemicals that might be hazardous to our health .  Anyway, I stashed my sons question away somewhere in my left brain and retrieved it just recently.  I have already described my interest in the cyclical nature of popular music and it's ability to be refreshed and repackaged, even when it has grown stylishly funky (The Beatles).  So, Naturally I  have linked this interest with my own gum consumption- refreshing the outdated and funky.  Of course, word play did play a part (as it often does) when linking disparate items like Extra sugar free gum and The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour: pop, saccharin, sweet, bold, long lasting.  But even ideas like rich flavor contrasting with concepts like "no nutritional value" are interesting to me.  But the mental images and palettes that have been mixing in my head the most recently are the contemporary, neon, pastel but artificial colors of Extra sugar free gum and the funky 1967 color schemes of The Beatles' album and film.  That, and the idea of a magical mystery tour that only takes place in your mouth.

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

Tracking the Right Brain-Part 2

I do not sketch before I start a painting.  Painting non-representational (I try to avoid the word abstract- it is too loaded and too easily misunderstood), I instead start by imagining palettes that contrast and play off each other well, and then spend time color mixing (physically and mentally) as a way of "planning" a painting.  However, I have tried to expand the concept of palette to mean more than just color, but also include the texture, current events, and zeitgeist of a given moment.  This means that I am usually hunting out promising little nuggets as I go about my day. Here is an example I am currently mulling over: I recently uncovered my copy of The Beatles album "Magical Mystery Tour."  I hadn't listened to the album for years, although I could hear some songs from this album on many local radio stations since it is always popular to play The Beatles songs.  I started thinking about how The Beatles' music has just became available on itunes recently and remembered one reporter on NPR predicting that this would not amount to much considering how most people already have music by The Beatles in one form or another.  This struck me as a little funny and a little sad, this strange cycle of pop culture.  Once, Magical Mystery Tour really was magical, The Beatles being pretty avant garde and innovative in their time (I think the album was released as a part of the film, which involved loading circus performers and the the band into a bus without a script, and filming their random journey).  But we live in a culture of saturation, and so they are able to become background noise, acceptable as office music, as one local radio station loves to say.  And yet, there is still a continual push to reintroduce The Beatles to our world- the release of un-heard studio sessions a few years ago, the anniversaries of album releases commemorated by new packaging of, say, Sargent Pepper, the observation of John Lennon's birthday marked by new interviews and tribute stories- all of these readily come to mind.  How much re-listening can we do?  It seems like we will not hear anything new.  And yet, I was really excited to see Magical Mystery Tour the other day, and put it right onto my ipod. And right now I am studying the colors of the album cover in my studio.

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

Tracking the Right Brain- part 1

As an exercise, I thought it might be interesting to try to track some of the right brain thinking that goes into a particular painting.  This is a bit treacherous to do, as I have found when I am standing in the awkward space of an art opening and someone asks,"where did the title for this one come from?"  In such situations I find myself talking weird circles around what was probably the most interesting part of the painting for them, like someone trying to explain a funny joke and leaving out all the context that actually makes the irony work.  I usually get a response like, "Oh, okay,"thus ending the conversation.  The truth is that art is usually better at posing questions than answers, and that whatever form of communication art offers, it usually communicates so much better as a painting, which stands still in all of it's layers, verses words that spread out, encircle, and add to meaning in unexpected ways.  I would prefer for the viewer to come up with the bulk of the story, so I try, in the form of painting, to provide  a good prompt.

Even though this is all true, the teacher in me thinks it might be at least interesting to take apart the non-linear mental narrative that contributes to the building of a painting.  And so, some portion of this blog will be dedicated to sifting through the mental material that goes into the building.  It might deflate the artistic gesture but revealing the mundane under pinnings of an artwork, but I hope it will also shed light on why the every day and the painterly merge so well.

So, I have been thinking about mountains and thinking about adding them to my new painting. Like steep, snow covered mountains.  This could be because I incorporated mountian-like shapes into the last painting I made that was this size. This could have come from a friend recently posting a picture of herself in Vale on Facebook, which made me think about the image of the Rockies, always a hazy presence on the horizon in Denver where I grew up. But it probably came from the cover for the Radiohead album  Kid A, which I borrowed from the public library to add to my ipod.  This is troublesome, because recently I was sitting in a meeting at school and I showed a fellow teacher an image of my painting Microsoft Windows and Dirty Laundry  and  he responded,"Hey, this looks like the cover for that Radiohead album Hail to the Thief."  I saw the resemblance, and I knew that this connection had to be a coincidence, but I immediately started to doubt myself.  Was I stealing imagery?  Am I that easily influenced?  I love to listen to Radiohead while working in my studio, so maybe there was a psychic connection?  I dunno, but today my solution was to paint steep, snow covered mountains, hanging into the frame of my painting upside-down, like stalactites.  Take that Radiohead!

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com

Starting a Painting

Over the last week I've built two panels that are 4'X6' each, wanting to make a large diptych.  I have stretched canvas over them and gessoed them, but today I started "working" on top of them.  The start of paintings...it's a funny thing.  I can't really say where paintings start.  This one could have started last month, as I sat in my studio finishing up the small pieces that are now a part of the "Formed Alliance" exhibit that is now up at the Frame Guild in Wichita (small plug there), looking over at the vacant end of my studio and feeling a sinking tug at my gut, wanting to return to painting something big.  It could have been a few weeks ago when my son said, "Dad?  How come you haven't made a painting about gum before?"  It could have been the weeks since as I have dealt with insomnia, half way composing a large horizontal plane in my mind and half way willing myself to not compose it now, as I always make better decisions in the moment reacting to happenings with the canvas and media instead of some "plan."  As I said above, today was that day when the happenings started to happen, along with those moments where I was negotiating, compromising, and daring things to happen. 

I have learned not to romanticise or fear the blank canvas too much, partly because it is such a cheesy cliche and partly because those ideas tend to slow me way down.  I am always telling my students that left brain thinking dictates that we do not have to start at the beginning of things, with a logical plan, but can start by jumping into the middle and starting to swim around.  I did find a great nugget of wisdom years ago when reading a book about Richard Diebenkorn.  The passage talked about how after the artists death when family members were sorting through his studio they discovered a little list of notes the artist had made for himself about starting a painting.  I, as an overly eager undergrad, promptly copied the list so that I could post it in my studio and allow it's light to shine on me.  I am reproducing it here without permission or proper bibliographic citing:

Notes to myself on beginning a painting...
1. Attempt what is not certain.  Certainty may or may not come later.  It may then be a valuable delusion.
2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued- except as a stimulus for further moves.
3. Do search, but in order to find other than what is searched for.
4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
5. Don't "discover" a subject- of any kind.
6. Somehow don't be bored- but if you must, use it in action.  Use it's destructive potential.
7. Mistakes can't be erased but they move you from your present position.
8. Keep thinking about Pollyanna.
9. Tolerate chaos.
10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

I love this list.  I have no idea who Pollyanna was/is, (I am pretty sure Richard Diebenkorn's wife was named Phyllis) but I know that seemingly random obsessions can often prove useful when entering into a studio mentality.

One day, after making many many more paintings I will have to make my own list of starting notes.

Please visit my work at: kevinpkellyart.artspan.com