Home News Tribune - Sunday, July 14, 2002

Following The Story Line - Narrative plays a key role in Hamilton artist's quirky paintings

By Laurie Granieri
It is a widely held notion in art circles that museum visitors spend an average of 3.7 seconds looking at a piece of art.

Thomas Kelly's immense acrylic canvases - enigmatic, moody and strongly narrative - are sure to stretch even the shortest attention span.

They're riveting.

A woman sits with one leg folded, petting a cat, as another figure stands, staring, with hands behind her back; a woman swings beneath a rose-colored sky and a violet tree as her companion snoozes on a checkered blanket; a figure sits alone on a sofa, legs crossed, eyes downcast, as a party swirls around her.

The body language is strong, the palette bold and pared down, the scenes legible yet mildly disturbing. Each figure, simply drawn on an austere, flattened background, appears to possess a complex inner life any therapist would be itching to mine.

One might expect Kelly himself, a painter and printmaker from Hamilton, to be mysterious or eccentric, but he defies those stereotypes.

"People ask, 'Well, what is this one about?' Since the very beginning I haven't said anything," Kelly says.

Sometimes the paintings are exactly what they appear to be.

"I'm not Agatha Christie here," he explains, although he admits he is delighted to know people are interacting with his works.

"My dealer (C.J. Mugavero) says my paintings cause the most dialogue in her gallery," says Kelly, who's represented by The Artful Deposit.

"People go on and on" trying to figure out the works, his wife, Linda, says.

By day, Kelly is a production supervisor at KNF Neuberger, Inc., a company in Trenton that produces vacuum pumps for medical devices and environmental monitors, as well as pumps for bomb and drug detectors. He has been with the company nearly 20 years.

"There, everything is rigid and defined, and you're going to tenths of millimeters. Here, I was always taught don't even use a ruler, so it's a good balance, actually," he says over lunch at his home. He's barefoot, dressed in shorts and a black shirt.

Kelly, 39, has only been an artist for nine years. He says it all started because he decided to spruce up his home.

"I had a big, empty house, and I started making sculpture and wall-hangings," he says.

When Kelly's sister saw his work, she suggested he take some art classes. He began drawing and making prints, then moved on to painting in acrylics.

In 1997, he earned an associate's degree in fine arts at Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, the same year he married Linda. They have one son, a smiley 9-month-old named Henry Thomas.

"A lot of my friends were never initiated into the art stuff," he says, and Kelly himself doesn't overanalyze the process. "'What, you're a painter now - a house painter?'"

When Kelly told a friend he had a dealer, his friend jokingly asked if Kelly had a drug dealer. In 1998 he had his first solo show, at the Trenton City Museum.

Kelly's provocatively titled works ("Refuses to Merge," "At the Corner of Stubborn and Pride," "Put on Your Face for Dinner") have been exhibited at Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, Mariboe Gallery in Hightstown and the Lafayette Yard Marriott in Trenton, among other venues.

Kelly says the Marriott liaison told him, "Your paintings are about as far out as the Marriott goes." Two of his works are hanging in the hotel's restaurant.

"They said, 'No nudes, no churches.' I go, 'How about drinking and smoking?' They said, 'Yeah, that's fine.' "

Fifteen new paintings by Kelly will be on view as part of a three-person exhibit Sept. 21-Nov. 10 at the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie Mansion. Other exhibiting artists are Isabella Natale and Jack Knight.

As a kid growing up in the Mercerville section of Hamilton, Kelly was not an artist - he was a reader, just like his father, a pharmacist.

"We always read everything," he says. "And that's always what I was drawn to: writing, the story line."

In some ways, Kelly approaches his work like a writer: He scribbles narrative ideas and sketches for paintings in a notebook he keeps handy. He keeps track of the "story lines" by starring the ideas he has already brought to canvas. All of the works seem to have a dreamlike quality, in which at least one of the figures is removed from the scene, observing the others.

He keeps two tape recorders, one in his car and one in his bag, to take down ideas, many of which he draws from everyday situations.

"Sometimes I just grab a pencil and write," he says.

The paintings don't necessarily tell the whole story; they are "more of a feeling or situation," Kelly says, "and most of the situations are not anything out of the ordinary - just common . . .

"It's nothing really earth-shaking in the beginning," he adds. "We overlook the ordinary."

Some of Kelly's paintings can be viewed on The Artful Deposit's Web site at www.theartfuldeposit.com. The Artful Deposit is based in Bordentown and Allentown.