James Kelly
Jimmy Kelly is an emerging artist with a growing following. Thirty four and from Kilkenny, he has participated successfully in a number of group exhibitions in the South East, and exhibited in this years Waterford Fringe Festival. His work, romantic in nature, concentrates on colours and texture in a distinctive stylised manner.
His first love was writing and his painting was something he just dabbled in occasionally but in the last five years the painting has taken over and has been a consuming passion which doesn’t look like abating. The art he paints he would describe as romantic expressionism, as he loves romantic themes, a balloon seller on a busy street, a women walking with an umbrella etc. these types of themes inspire him. Expressionism is the term that probably suits the application of paint the best. Jimmy says no one is ever going to look at one of his paintings and admire the fine detail as for him the thought and the physical activity of painting are totally inter-related.
Like most he has experimented with lots of mediums. But his two main mediums are pastels and oils. Just the smell of oils always drives him on. Just recently he has been experimenting with encaustics, and mixing beeswax into the paintings because texture is very important to him. Colour is Jimmy’s primary consideration even if it is a greyed down muddy version its still colour to him. He loves bravura strokes and interesting textures and hates boring surfaces, which attempt to hide the painting process.
The main thing Jimmy wants is to evoke feelings in the viewer but what those feelings are he’s not to sure, it seems to change as much as the painting does. He paints to figure out his own feelings on a subject and if it works for him the likely hood is it will work for others, on some level. He likes to think that he articulates his ambitions, dreams etc in his paintings and in a few years time he will be shocked when he looks at images of his work and realise what was going on. In broad terms, his personal philosophy is to build up not to tear down.
Jimmy is influenced by and has gone through love affairs with vary. He loves Jack Vettriano and Mogdigliani at present and indeed all the expressionist from that period. He has also always loved the work of Harley Brown and Ramon Kelley. These are artist that are easily accessible in terms of what they do.
