Jay Kelly

Jay Kelly (born 1975), originally from Northern California, made his home in Venice, California after graduating from UCLA. He began his career in graphic design and started experimenting with figurative collage in the late 1990s. He is self-taught as a fine artist, learning art history from secondhand books while clipping the meaningful images and bits of text that became his source material.

Kelly's signature approach is to "paint with paper" — building near-photorealistic images from hand-torn pieces of vintage magazines, novels (both classics and the obscure), art history books, and hand-dyed paper, then sealing the surface with resin on panel. The process is labor intensive: he hand-tears and glues each piece, takes squinted-eye trips across the studio to check proportion, and the bits get smaller as the piece nears completion. The reward for the close look is the texture and the buried text — "layers of meaning" — beneath what reads as a photographic surface from a distance.

His subject matter often focuses on the great outdoors, but the compositions are contemporary blends of classic beauty and modern life. He has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Aspen, Park City, and Miami, with gallery representation across the United States, Canada (Whistler, BC), and Germany. His work has appeared in television shows and in feature films, including Donnie Darko.