Scott Kelley
February 2 – April 27, 2024
Scott Kelley started the grant program after learning that native craftsmen were struggling to afford supplies they used to gather for free.
PEAKS ISLAND — Scott Kelley walks slowly down Island Avenue, lamenting the culture of fear that has lately directed the course of American life. These days, a lot of people spend a lot of time and energy consumed with fear, worrying about protecting their borders and their homes and combating the omniscient bogeyman.
Kelley isn’t buying it. He’s not naive about the dangers and threats of modern society, but he refuses to raise his kid in a culture of fear.
It was from that mindset that Kelley, a fine-art painter best known for his engrossingly detailed watercolors of flamingos and herons, wrote and illustrated his first children’s book, “I Am Birch.” Yarmouth-based Islandport Press releases the book this week, and Kelley celebrates with a launch party at 4:30 p.m. Friday at Maine Historical Society in Portland.
Scott Kelley is currently showing at Surovek Gallery in Palm Beach, Florida. This exhibition contains works by Kelley that embrace the flora and fauna of Florida through watercolors of flamingos, herons, alligators, and waterlillies.
Scott Kelley's article "Poetic Research" has been featured in Volume 17 of Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life. His piece discusses the research and process behind creating his work. Kelley writes, "That's how my work gets made: in bits and pieces, one thing leading to another, then another, until the process stops. With the whales, this hasn't happened yet. Part of me hopes it never will."
Scott Kelley will be featured in the upcoming Of Whales in Paint: Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick, on view from October 15 through December 31, 2016. The installation, inspired by the PMA’s recent acquisition of a Lakeside Press Rockwell Kent edition of the novel, will examine historic and contemporary artistic responses to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The museum chose several of Kelley’s paintings and scrimshaw pieces for the exhibition, as well as works by Jamie Wyeth, Frank Stella and Leonard Baskin.
SCOTT KELLEY will give a talk at the opening reception for OF WHALES IN PAINT at the PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART on Friday, October 14th, beginning at 6:00 PM. Several of Mr. Kelley’s works are included in the exhibition, along with works by Rockwell Kent, Jamie Wyeth, Leonard Baskin and others. Admission is free – we hope to see you there!
Congratulations to Scott Kelley! Scott’s Self-Portrait as Ishmael’s Arm is going to be included in the upcoming inaugural exhibition of the new museum configuration, MASTERWORKS ON PAPER – Highlights from the Portland Museum of Art, which opens on Thursday, January 21. His work is also featured in the first volume their permanent collection, called: THE COLLECTION – Highlights From The Portland Museum of Art.
Scott Kelley will lead a gallery tour as part of the Portland Museum of Art’s Artist Intervention Series on Friday, July 11th, from 5:00 – 7:00 PM. The artist will focus upon some of the lesser-known works in the museums collection, including paintings by early American portraitist John Brewster, Jr., Hudson River School painter Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley and others. Admission is free, and you can find more information by visiting the museum website at portlandmuseum.org, or visit the artists Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Scott-Kelley-Studio/96682848316.
Scott Kelley‘s show, WHALE, currently on exhibit at Dowling Walsh Gallery, was featured in the American Art Collector’s August 2012 issue.
Scott Kelley was born in Binghamton, New York in 1963. He studied at The Cooper Union School of Art, New York; The Slade School of Art, London; and was a fellow at The Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He had his first solo exhibition at the age of eighteen with The American Realist Gallery in New York, and has had over 15 solo exhibitions since then.
Kelley’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Portland Museum of Art and the Portland Public Library. He was awarded a fellowship to the Edward Albee Foundation in 1993. He also received a grant from the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which sent him to Palmer Station, Antarctica in 2003.
Scott Kelley lives and works on Peaks Island, Maine, with his wife, Gail, their son, Abbott.
Scott Kelley: Of Birds, Warp and Rock
Over the past dozen years or so, Scott Kelley has distinguished himself as an artist of birds, with a special passion for those winged creatures that frequent the water. He has painted the humble and the grand, from the Guillemot to the Great Blue Heron, as well as several extinct species.
Using watercolor and gouache Kelley depicts the birds with a precision akin to Audubon or Tyson. Yet his avian portraits move beyond natural history to something poetic—and literary: a pair of herons is named Ahab and Ishmael in homage to Melville. All of them convey a sense of wonder worthy of Rachel Carson.
Without overplaying the affinity, Kelley shares the sharp-eyed focus of his favorite bird, the Great Blue Heron. With care he represents their curving necks and pointed beaks, steely eyes and long legs. In a tribute to Albrecht Dürer, he paints a heron wing, alone and glorious—a model for Daedalus.
An obsessive artist, Kelley pursues his vision however daunting or complex it may be. This past winter he completed a remarkable series of watercolors of pot warp, the line used by lobstermen to secure their traps. Taken out of context of dock, deck or fish house, the coils of rope are transformed into lively abstract configurations, exquisite and often ethereal.
Kelley first registered warp as a subject during a stay on Monhegan, a favorite haunt since his first visit there as a teenager. Over the years the remote island has inspired a range of work, including a stunning group of sepia ink drawings of Pulpit Rock. The imposing outcrop is recreated with meticulous crosshatching and other marks as if by an architect infatuated with rock.
Whether he is painting a roseate tern in free fall, “the second of Sherm’s purple warp” or a Monhegan headland, Kelley is a master of the object observed. Simply stated, his art elicits awe.
by Carl Little
