Martha Kelly Art

I’ve been realizing lately that it’s my 20th anniversary of being a professional artist. In 1999 I had my first ever gallery show, at Cecelia Lin Gallery in Brookhaven Circle. It was a still life show in pastel. This fall my show at Playhouse on the Square (still up through this Sunday) is the first pure still life show I’ve done since, though I did include some in the Autobiography show a couple of years ago. I dug out one of the old pastels to photograph and include here just for fun. I still love pastels, but they have to be protected under glass to go out in the world, and I finally got tired of framing them. However, I did really enjoy the immediacy of sticks of color in my hand, and I love the texture you can get with the highlights and depths of bumpy paper.

I feel unbelievably lucky to be able to live this life and make art almost daily. I’m so grateful to the community around me, all of you who have come to shows, taken home art to live with, sent words of encouragement, and shared my work for your friends. It all adds up. It takes a village for an artist to work full time as an artist, and I have a flat out fantastic village.

I've been walking daily in the forest lately thinking of trying some oils of it, as a break from the water paintings, but watercolors (my normal plein air medium these days) don't give me enough depth to work from in forest scenes. They're fine for wider landscape or water pieces, but the forest has a lot more density and depth, and I've never been happy with my watercolors inside it.

So I got my pastels out this week for the first time in several years and pulled the big French box easel down from its high shelf. (I usually just take a cushion and do watercolors in my lap.) You can see my set up at the right.

I had forgotten some of my colors, what and where they were, but it felt good to work in pastels again. They're the most immediate medium I use. There's no brush or intermediary. You just pick up a hunk of color and go.

I got all excited about the sycamore and started a painting of it the next day. It's simpler and more styleized than most of mine, and I'm going to keep working on it (I only had three hours by the time I started it before I had to be somewhere else. We'll see where it goes when I get the chance to get back to my easel. I'm also hoping to keep doing more studies and see what else I come up with.