Paul Kelly: The Sky’s the Limit
July 7, 2016
A Provincetown artist paints his world as he sees itâfrom a unique perspective.
Text by Julie Dugdale
When Paul Kelly travels abroad, he takes a sketchbook instead of a camera. Flip through the pad and youâll find pages of pencil-smudged buildings, streets, and hillsidesâscenes he likely jotted while stopped at a red light. âThis is my tool,â he says. âThis is how I see things. These are the townscapes.â
Kelly, an architect by training, lives in Provincetown, and images of that seaside enclave jumpstarted his career as a painter. That was in 2004, which makes him a relative newcomer to the scene, compared with many of the lifelong artists who call Provincetown their home and creative muse. Plenty of those artists are representationalâmeaning their work depicts recognizable objects or subjectsâas is his own work, Kelly says. But the latest incarnation of Kellyâs art, a series called âAbove It,â reveals a unique perspective.
The scenes are still Provincetown, and theyâre spatially accurate, but theyâre constructed as if he were flying overhead, looking down on the roads, roofs, coastlines, and paved spaces below. How does he see the town from that angle? Mostly, it started as an accident, Kelly says. âOne time I was at my desk, and I thought, âIâm going to look at Google Earth and try to find Provincetown.â I started finding these patterns of light and dark.â
He began putting those patterns on canvas. âItâs still what I would consider representational,â he says. âThough I started to abstract it more.â The overall result? âItâs kind of an attitude about the town.â
âAbove Itâ is a long way from where Kelly started. He calls himself âsemi-retiredâ from his work as a principal at Boston- and Provincetown-based Manitou Architects, which he founded with Edward Dusek in 1979. The career followed naturally after earning an Âarchitecture degree from Rhode Island School of Design. But Kelly also has a fine-arts education from Syracuse University, and moving to Provincetown unleashed a different sort of creativity. âIf youâre interested in a built environment, buildings, propertiesâand thatâs what youâve done your whole lifeâit seems like a natural progression to get involved with images you know,â he says. âAnd I know how to draw something that looks like a little town. The opportunity is here to absorb.â
So Kelly absorbed. He explored the streets, views, buildings, docks, and beaches in Provincetown, looking for interesting angles and points of beauty to catch his interest. He would sketch a scene, then fill in the sketches with watercolor, and eventually transform the watercolor into oil on canvas. The more he painted, the less concerned he became with getting the exact shade of the house right or including details like windows and doors in a building. Over time, he tweaked his style to focus more on shadows, light, and composition, which works well with his Google Earth explorations. âNow, Iâll go right to a canvas without previously drawing and put it down as it comes,â Kelly says. âThatâs very different from the way I started, when it was very measured. Now, you can see the shape of a building, but itâs not the most important thing. The thoughts are all there, and you can put it together, but I donât feel like Iâm responsible for showing something as it really is.â
Greatly influenced by the shapes and colors of abstract landscape painters Richard Diebenkorn and Nicolas de StaĂŤl, Kelly taught himself the techniques of the artists he admired as his painting evolved, and he regularly attends art classes, including figure-drawing, to stay limber with his eye and perception of form.
Kellyâs work will be on display in an exhibit July 8 to July 22 at Alden Gallery in Provincetownâs fabled East End gallery district. Gallery owner Howard Karren says he doesnât generally take on someone considered an emerging artist, as Kelly was when they met. âItâs very unusual to see someone who is relentlessly energetic in terms of changing their point of view,â Karren says. âPaul is always looking at new ways of doing things. I hadnât seen anyone think of using Google Earth as a point of view for looking at the landscape. Itâs a way of seeing the world, and no one else has picked up on it.â â˘
editorâs note: Paul Kelly is represented by Alden Gallery, Provincetown, (508) 487-4230, aldengallery.com. To see more of his work, visit paulkellystudio.net.
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