08 | Ellsworth Kelly | Kindred Aesthetics

Ellsworth Kelly was born in Newburgh, NY in 1923. Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and print-maker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form. Art critic for the Gaurdian, Adrian Searle writes, “Like many great colourists, Kelly was as interested in black and white as the harmonies and dissonance of high-keyed hues, in meeting points, edges and limits as much as spread and optical radiance and saturation of the colour field. Often, the canvases and panels were shaped like sections of ellipses, arcs, diagonals and curves. There were wedges and odd rhomboids that looked as though they were obeying an impossible perspective. Your eye could follow a curve and be sent off on some unexpected parabola before being halted with a jolt. His art was full of energy and stillness and unexpected meetings. How human the abstract is.

All this gave his art a wonderfully understated eccentricity, even though it was always reigned in by a feeling for rightness, which is a quality more easily sensed than explained. Throughout his career Kelly drew, with a lovely sparse line and feel for a shape’s placement on the empty sheet of paper. A great foil to his paintings, these outline drawings of lily leaves, lemons, vines, fig and briar felt like they had grown as nature does, without any contrivance. In all his art there is no apparent struggle, just a feeling of arrival.”

I recently visited the San Francisco MOCA where I saw some gorgeous Ellsworth Kelly wall panels and paintings. I was struck by their clean gesture and simplicity of form. It reminded me of a film to share with you. The Shaker practice and aesthetics have had a profound influence on generations of artists. This short documentary of Kelly and photographer Jack Shear discusses their visits to the Mount Lebanon, New York Shaker village - and on their views of the architecture and design as well as their personal collection of furniture and artistic responses. It is available on demand on Amazon or Vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/shakervillage

https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/Ellsworth_Kelly/?sa=1

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/28/ellsworth-kelly-abstract-artist