Ellsworth Kelly – Master Colorist

Ellsworth Kelly – Nine Squares

“In a sense, what I’ve tried to capture is the reality of flux, to keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing.” – Ellsworth Kelly

When anyone speaks of legendary artist Ellsworth Kelly, they speak of Color. Painter, sculptor and printmaker extraordinaire, Ellsworth Kelly became one of the most important figures in postwar American art.

He was born in New York in 1923. When he was very young, his mother and grandmother got him interested in ornithology and later, this early fascination with the brilliant colors of birds would influence his choice of colors in his art. Kelly later studied painting at the Pratt Institute before serving in WWII for a very unusual battalion. Ellsworth and many other artists and designers worked for a deception unit called the Ghost Army where they created inflatable war vehicles to mislead the enemy about Allied troop activities.

Returning to the US, Kelly studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, before once again heading overseas. From 1948-1954, he lived in France after the war and began painting abstractions. He attended the Beaux-Arts de Paris and immersed himself in the many artistic influences around him, encountering such historic artists and their work as Picasso, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Joan Miro and Alberto Giacometti. He was deeply influenced by Claude Monet. Kelly visited Monet’s studio in Giverny, ”I first went to see Claude Monet’s house and garden at Giverny when I was living nearby in 1948…The house was quite a mess then; it was inhabited by pigeons and some of the final paintings were stacked against each other…I went back to see what they [the paintings] looked like close up—you couldn’t really see them hanging on the walls of museums—and they were just as fresh as they could be, those late water lilies.”

Kelly was unaware of what was going on with the Abstract Expressionists in the US at that time; his evolution as an artist came from his own experience and inner vision. He was introduced to the technique of automatic drawing, drawing images on paper without looking at them…freeing up his technique