The Neoclassical Art of John Kelley

After receiving a degree in art history and painting from the University of Tennessee in 1974, John Woodrow Kelley studied architecture at Pratt Institute, an institution long associated with the Bauhaus International movement and modern art. The Clinton-Hill neighborhood that surrounds Pratt's eighteen-acre campus is a veritable textbook of 19th- century Greek Revival, Federal, and Gothic Revival architecture. The Italianate villas, Victorian brownstones, and Romanesque mansions with cast terra cotta trimmings were home to many of New York's leading families. Kelley fell in love with the architecture,although his fellow students and faculty members regarded such views as subversive. Hestudied painting and drawing with two contemporary masters, Milet Andrejevic (New YorkAcademy of Art) and Dr. Beverly Hale (Art Students League). He credits artist Ted Jacobs,now living in France, for much of his academic drawing skill.

Almost twenty years later, Kelley lives and works in the same 1870 Brooklyn brownstone, which he has filled with objects, sculptures and furnishings from the late 18th and early l9th centuries. In his studio he creates images of ancient gods and goddesses Persephone, Oedipus and the Sphinx, and Hercules with Queen Omphale. He attributes the idealized nudes, flowing draperies, and heightened colors to the classical tradition of David, Ingres, Leighton and Alma-Tadema.

His paintings are represented in the Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee State Museum, Lincoln Center, and Yale University, as well as numerous private collections. He is represented by the Fischbach Gallery in New York City and maintains a second studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.

 

From American Arts Quaterly, Summer 1992