Good news: Kelly extended

(above, Boats in Sanary Harbor, 1952, collage on paper, private collection; from PMA website: http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/special/110.html)


Good news: the gorgeous little exhibit of early Ellsworth Kelly work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ellsworth Kelly: Paris/New York, 1949-1959, has been extended until the 24th of September.

I got to see this show back in March, when it had first opened, and it gives a genuine glance at the formation of Kelly's aesthetics, which are still influencing him to this day. It also made me fall more in love with his sensibilities; the realization that an embrace of abstraction is not, as is often assumed, an implicit turning away from the natural and seen, but may rather be a deep, heartfelt and thoroughly human response to, and beautiful interpretation of, the natural world. His drawings inspired by the light reflecting off of the Siene are particularly bewitching.

I met Ellsworth Kelly in 2000, when I was working with Atelier Arts Services at a collector's home. He was there to witness the installation of one of his steel arc wall pieces. He was very sweet; walking around to each of the art handlers that were there, asking us if, we too, were painters.