Scott Kelley: The Bird Man of Peaks Island, article from MBH&H Issue 110

With consummate artistry, this painter portrays a wide range of water birds.

BY CARL LITTLE

SCOTT KELLEY

ONE DAYin the fall of

1997, Scott Kelley, while sailing with his wife Gail off Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island, New York, watched two great blue herons fly over. From his perch in the beamy Beetlecat Lucy (named for a favorite dog), the painter was struck by the birds’ grandeur. As is his habit, he stored away the image for a while before using it in his art.

Turning to his favorite medium, watercolor, Kelley painted his first heron that winter. Since then, the gallery of great blues painted by him numbers around 50. Add

his paintings of other members of the extended heron family, and the total is in the hundreds.

This past winter Kelley was in his home on Peaks Island finishing up one of his grandest herons yet: a dramatic frontal view of the long-necked, sharp-beaked bird with its wings splayed and feathers bristling. This remarkable portrait is based on studies he made of a pair of blue herons that had staked out a spot on City Point on Peaks Island last summer. The artist became fascinated by what appeared to be a courtship ritual: the male heron

Surf Scoter at Pulpit Rock, Monhegan, 2009. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 48x34". At right: Ahab, 2010. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 40x30".

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Scott Kelley portrait by Victor Romanyshyn

The BIRD MAN of Peaks Island

pulled his wings behind his back and did a dance. In general, Kelley said, herons are great posers, which makes them endlessly attractive as subjects.

For the last six or so years Kelley has focused on birds.

He has painted many ducks, including a pair of mergansers that he nicknamed “Sid” and “Nancy” (after the punk rock couple with the spiky hairdos). He also produced a splendid series of paintings of flamingos, many of them large scale, which transformed a gallery in Easthampton, New York, into a pink emporium.

Kelley’s fascination with water birds has led him to some out-ofthe-way places. A number of years ago, he learned about the natural history collection at the L.C. Bates Museum in Hinckley, Maine, and arranged to pay a visit in the dead of winter. Director and curator Deborah Staber opened up the cases and allowed him to photograph and draw various specimens, and take measurements.

Kelley was especially drawn to the extinct and rare species, including the Labrador duck and the spectacled cormorant.

Drawing on studies made at the museum, plus additional research, Kelley eventually did a series of portraits of these ill-fated creatures. He rendered them with precision, without a setting (although a couple of birds are shown paddling in the water). In several cases, legends written in small print follow the curves of their backs, a variation on the traditional natural history presentation featuring Latin names and site of viewing.

The artist avoided backgrounds, wishing to focus on his feathered subjects, but in 2008 he began painting birds in landscapes. His choice of setting was not random. Where, he wondered, might the last sighting of some of these birds have taken place? Perhaps on Monhegan, which lies on the Atlantic flyway and is an island to which the artist has a strong emotional connection.

Kelley turned to his collection of vintage Monhegan postcards for backdrops. His handsome and hale Labrador duck (above) fills the foreground of an old view of Manana Island and the harbor, while the “last great auk” is depicted sitting on a granite ledge with Gull Rock in the distance.

Years earlier, Kelley had made a series of trompe-l’oeil copies of the Monhegan postcards. He also has occasionally painted the island landscape. Last summer, he hired fisherman Rusty Spear to take him out in his skiff to the far end of the island, where Kelley made sketches of Pulpit Rock, one

of the most distinct yet least-painted landmarks due to its location. Watercolor and pen-and-ink renderings of this formation demonstrate Kelley’s precise hand.

More recently, coils of warp found among the boathouses on Monhegan caught Kelley’s eye. Over this past winter, he has been working on a series of watercolors of the rope used by island lobstermen, attracted by its color and pattern.

Rope is difficult to paint due to the level of detail involved—“It takes forever,” the artist acknowledged—but such considerations have never stopped Kelley from tackling a particular subject.

Indeed, Kelley is the consummate artist, going to remarkable lengths to achieve his vision. His bird paintings, for example, appear to have foxing, those reddish-brown spots that one finds on antique prints and in old books. The artist creates these marks himself, adding a patina to the sheets of handmade watercolor paper he uses. (The paper is made by Twinrocker, in Indiana.)

“There’s something about having the foxing there that makes the paintings almost, in my mind, more believable,” Kelley explained—sso believable that frame-shop owners have expressed concern, thinking the stains were real.

BORN IN Binghamton, New York, in 1963, Kel-

ley remembers roaming the Adirondack Mountains as a youngster and drawing all the time, with encouragement from his family. After a stint in military school (his parents hoped it would straighten out his rambunctious ways), he enrolled in the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. One of the instructors there, Sharon Francis, helped him understand how much it takes to be an artist, “How hard it is.” He developed a work ethic and confirmed his desire to be a painter.

Encounters with art over the years have had an enormous impact on Kelley’s sensibility and development. On a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, for example, he was stunned by Albrecht Dürer’s Wing of a Blue Roller, a watercolor painted by the German artist in 1512. A postcard of the painting found a permanent place on the wall of Kelley’s studio; a vision of glorious bird wings was made manifest in his mind.

Kelley was struck by The Nativity (1470-1475) by Piero della Francesca, which he found at another national gallery, this one in London, while taking courses at the Slade School of Fine Art. How had the early Renaissance artist painted the faces of the singing angels? To Kelley, it seemed as if Piero had “breathed upon the surface and gently rubbed with the palm of his hand until they appeared.”

From London, Kelley moved to Houston, Texas, to attend the Glassell School of Art. The teaching wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, the school’s artist-in-residence postgraduate felAbove: Labrador Duck (extinct c. 1864), Monhegan, 2009.

Watercolor and gouache on paper, 30x40".

At left: Nest, 2006. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 60x90".

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lowship program serves to help artists make the transition from formal training to professional careers. Kelley studied with abstract painter Gary Stephan, whose simple and direct course description appealed to him: “What paintings are for and how to make them do things.”

World events, including the nuclear powerplant meltdown at Chernobyl, Ukraine, and the “Troubles” in Ireland, led Kelley to explore conceptual/political ideas. One of his shows in SoHo in 1989 included jars full of garbage collected from the street in front of the gallery. Another exhibition, which

Kelley is the consummate artist, going to remarkable lengths to achieve his vision.

Moving back to New York City in 1988, Kelley painted in the kitchen of his East Village railroad flat. His first solo show sold well, but he was still finding his artistic footing. As part of his training and to support himself, he worked for several artists, including a forger named David Stein and Julian Schnabel, the renowned master of broken-plate aesthetics and now an award-winning filmmaker. Kelley stayed with Schnabel for seven years, traveling the world, “gluing plates back on paintings.” (Schnabel was famous for gluing plates onto paintings; occasionally, a plate would need reattachment.)

revolved around the killing of three IRA terrorists by British troops in Gibraltar, featured 2,500 pounds of Katahdin potatoes spread on the gallery floor,

with three wool blankets dyed like the Irish tricolor draped over them. The show provoked a lot of attention from the media, including National Public Radio; the potatoes ended up at a pig farm in upstate New York.

Kelley’s subject matter changed dramatically after he and Gail moved to Long Island. Walking the beaches, he noticed the remarkable array of detritus strewn along the shore. He began making sketches and watercolors of crab shells and other objects. A show in Easthampton in 1998 consisted entirely of precise renderings of rocks. As a kind of tribute to his powers of verisimilitude, Kelly recalls with pleasure a well-dressed and “absurdly tanned” woman walking out of the gallery after declaring, “Just a bunch of photographs of rocks.”

A watercolor of the abandoned nest of a great black-backed gull discovered on a Montauk beach one day offers a wonderfully complex arrangement of driftwood, small bones, skate egg sacs, bits of Styrofoam, and other gatherings.

Kelley has also made exquisite studies of bird eggs, including one featuring 240 eggs painted in rows on a huge sheet of watercolor paper. His painting of a Portuguese Man of War is a tentacular tour de force.

In 2003 the National Science Foundation invited Kelley to join its artists and writers program in Antarctica, where he made studies of penguins, various rocks, and the looming and luminous icebergs. This trip to the southern end of the world haunts him to this day.

Above: Warp, Monhegan, 2010. Watercolor on paper, 22x30". Right: Pulpit Rock, Monhegan, 2009. Sepia ink on paper, 19x26". www.maineboats.com

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SCOTT KELLEYand his wife moved to Peaks Island in

Portuguese Man of War, 2009. Watercolor on paper, 48x34".

Lobster Claw, Monhegan, 2010.

Watercolor on paper, 18x16".

Contributing writer Carl Little lives on Mount Desert Island.

Scott Kelley is represented by the Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland; Gleason Fine Arts in Boothbay and Portland; Sigrid Freundorfer Fine Art in New York City; and Pamela Williams in Amagansett, New York. He will be showing new work at Dowling Walsh in July, 2010. His work can also be viewed at www.scottkelleystudio.com.

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2004, renting and then buying a small house a short walk from the ferry landing. While re-insulating the structure, which was built in 1900, they uncovered the signature of a former owner in several places; “Somehow Walter Springer wanted to be remembered,” said Kelley. They also found bills of lading from the Portland Fish Company and the Boston Farmer’s Market, leading them to surmise that the previous tenant had been a fisherman-farmer.

They painted some of the floors in the house yellow, a decorative conceit borrowed from the Shakers, who realized that in the wintertime a bit of color was a warm blessing. “What little sun you get makes the rooms glow,” Kelley noted.

Gail Kelley’s family has deep Maine roots. Her sixth great grandfather, Henry Trefethren, at one time owned Peaks, Monhegan, and several other Maine islands in toto. She first came to the state to attend the University of Southern Maine in Gorham; it was on return trips that she learned more about her Maine provenance (her maiden name is one of several variants of her ancestor’s, spelled Trefethern).

Kelley also has Maine ties, although of much more recent vintage. His family summered along the southern Maine coast when he was growing up. He first visited Monhegan when he was 15, and has tried to return every summer since.

The couple came to Peaks from Montauk, where they had lived for a number of years until it became overrun and “untenable.” They first looked for a place on Chebeague Island, but nothing was available. When a real estate agent suggested Peaks, they came up for a week in August to scope it out. Islanders wondered about their timing—“The island is a madhouse in late summer,” they said—but compared to the Hamptons at that time of year, Peaks represented a relatively quiet oasis.

Like many island residents, Gail Kelley commutes to the mainland. An occupational therapist, she works for the Gorham public school system. She is also president of the board of the Peaks Island Children’s Workshop, a nonprofit daycare provider on the island.

Until a year ago or so, Scott also made the daily boat trip to Portland, to paint in a rented studio. Nowadays he is happy to be working at home, taking time off from his art to walk Francis, the couple’s Irish terrier. He admits that he cherishes his solitude: “I’d be the greatest agoraphobe ever if I could just stay home and do nothing but paint,” he said with a smile.

The success of his bird paintings has allowed him to become a full-time artist; it’s the first time since junior high that he hasn’t had a “regular” job.

In Maine, Kelley has discovered a new reality, which he has embraced.

“You have to want to be here,” he has noted, citing the old saying, “If you haven’t done winter, then you don’t deserve summer.” He finds an innate solidity in Maine akin to that which he encountered in Antarctica. There is also the poetry of place: the sound of tugboats whistling in the distance reminds him of a calliope.

At the same time, Kelley recognizes the changes happening around him.

As year-rounders move off Peaks to be replaced by seasonal residents, the island loses some of its community feel. “I have lived here long enough now,” he noted, “that when I walk the dog at night at dinnertime, I notice fewer and fewer lights on every year.”

As he had in Montauk, Kelley finds himself collecting odds and ends along the shore. “There is a certain humanity that evolves from just looking at these things,” he has written.

Faced with novelist Don DeLillo’s “white noise” universe, the painter seeks simplicity in his art. “The minutia of the world,” Kelley stated, “is more the world than the world itself.” With an unerring eye and careful hand, he captures the beauty in a rock, a heron’s eye, or a coil of rope. And we, in turn, wonder at the sight.

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

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June / July 2010

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Issue 110