DIARMUID KELLEY

Kelley paints only from life, inviting his subjects to sit regularly over a period of months in a specially created ‘light chamber’ inspired by the 18th century painter Joseph Wright of Derby. The construction allows Kelley to control the effect of natural light on a subject and experiment with chiaroscuro. In a series of highly ambitious, large-scale portraits of Kelley’s regular sitters Bea and Max, the figure becomes part of a more complex tableau, in which the pattern of the Persian rug, or texture of a battered velvet chair, are as vividly described as the model’s luminous skin and hair. Inspired by the paintings of Ingres, Kelley revels in the depiction of fabrics - velvet, linen, damask, ermine – the precise character of each material instantly recognisable and visually remarkable.

“If you spend your life looking at objects, you become obsessed with the patina, with the roughness or smoothness, with the touch and the feel of things. You want them to somehow feel palpable. I don’t consciously think about trying to describe things like that. It just happens as if by magic ... and it’s magical when it does.”

Kelley’s still lifes offer him greater opportunity for experimentation. In the past, these smaller works “were mostly about colour and tone”; the placement of a few select objects became the vehicle through which to explore colour in an abstract way. As with his portraits, Kelley has become increasingly interested in capturing the surface texture of these objects - the crumbling glaze on a terracotta jug or the familiar powdery bloom of a tulip leaf.

A signature of Kelley’s work is to leave some areas of his canvases unpainted, a device which draws the eye more emphatically to the painted parts of the image, inviting the viewer to experience the attentions of the artist as he captures his sitter. The presence of unprimed linen foregrounds the viewer’s sense of the painting as a physical object. He explains, “I want to introduce every reminder that this is only an image, even while, at the same time, I’m trying to capture a real truth, a sense of an object as palpably real”.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which includes an interview with the artist by Rachel Campbell Johnston. A short film of Kelley working in his studio, directed by Sal Redpath, will be released to coincide with the show and will be available on the gallery’s website.