Featuring Peter Kelly NEAC RBA (1931-2019)

Peter Kelly NEAC RBA (1931-2019)

My father always loved the landscape of Essex, particularly its coastal marshes and small country churches. I remember visiting these locations with him, and he loved the sunlight, breaking through the clouds, that brought nature to life. He loved to travel more widely too, and many of the works in the current show speak to his travels with my mum to Italy or France, where he found the inspiration for the atmospheric interiors that are among his most archetypal works. Dad had a wonderful way of evoking mysterious spaces, sometimes inhabited by a solitary figure, and sometimes with no figures at all. Often, it is the light itself that acts as a protagonist in these compositions.

My mother has kept my father’s studio much as it was when he was alive. I can actually still sense his presence when I’ve returned to my parents’ house. There are still the piles of photographs that he used as reference, the seat where he worked, even some of his paints and brushes. Elsewhere in the house are the rows of art books, covering the work of artists from Vermeer to Hammershoi to Seago, to name but a few. Art offered inspiration to my father, in addition to his excursions into nature, and he would spend evenings leafing through his books.

Dad always enjoyed meeting with his artist friends, travelling up to London for gatherings of the RBA or NEAC. He was a good storyteller, and he liked to swap anecdotes and conversations, and just speak about art. I think he would be very happy to have this show in the company of his friends.

Simon Kelly, Curator and Head of Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, Saint Louis Art Museum