Scott Kelley
The tale of the vengeful Captain Ahab and his relentless pursuit of the great white whale, Moby Dick, has been an enduring source of inspiration for Kelley since he first encountered the novel as a teenager. "Moby Dick entered my life at the age of 16," he says, "and has informed everything I know, love, and hate about the sea, and all its moods." Multiple re-readings over the years prompted the artist's extensive research into whaling history and culture, resulting in an earlier series of watercolor paintings depicting whales and the imagined children of lost whalers.
The current exhibition, Scott Kelley: The Whale, is a culmination of his fascination with Melville's opus and its central themes of man versus nature and fate versus free will. Included is work in a variety of media, from painted resin sculptures of whalemen’s knit caps to three-dimensional shadow boxes of hand-drawn waves to large-scale watercolors of the novel's crew and scenes. "I've always thought of my gallery exhibits as operas complete with a cast of characters from a libretto," the artist has said.
Scott Kelley attended The Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, England. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in New York, with postgraduate studies at The Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. His work has been shown at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine, where it is in the permanent collection, and in more than thirty-five solo exhibitions in galleries throughout the United States. He has been an artist-in-residence at The Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York, and through The National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program at Palmer Station, Antarctica.