Mollie Kellogg Artist Statement  

 

With my mother a painter and my father a photographer and art collector, drawing and painting came relatively easily to me at an early age. Whenever my mother would take a break from painting, I would sneak in and add my own touches to her unattended canvas.

My technique has evolved over the years. After studying and performing theatre, becoming a mother and then facing serious health issues, my work has changed dramatically.  In the beginning, my figurative approach ranged from oil on canvas to illustration for publication in watercolor, pastel and pencil.  Theatre created opportunities for my fine art when mural-sized figures of nudes on stretched canvas caught the attention of local critics.

Moving from Arizona to Seattle and then to San Diego, oversized nudes became impractical to produce.  A transition to smaller, more personal work became important, as well as exploring many new themes in my life.  Today my paintings are still figurative in nature -- and I often use family, friends, fellow artists and myself as reference -- but they are now more complex, and more intimate.

As an actress missing her stage, I feel these paintings are moments expressed in body language and facial expression. I feel each curve and the position of each figure as if I were on a stage performing the scene as I paint.

Many ideas are inspired by dreams and life experiences. Some works are representational, reflecting my interest in mysticism, spirituality and a deeper connection with Nature. I am inspired by the images in poetry and literature, as well as the work of visual artists like Victorian painter, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Chicano Artist, George Yepes, and teacher, Betty Braig.

For some, my images of children resonate with the art of Mary Cassatt. But where Cassatt's work is design and color first and character studies second, my paintings center around emotion and are intended to be felt. The passion in my work also has been compared with the German artist Kathe Kollwitz.  Although my art draws more from American genre painting, I share Kollwitz's visceral appreciation of relationships and the human condition.

At present, my painting technique involves sketching the image into gesso while wet, then applying a metallic underpainting. Over this I pour combinations of colors, allowing the paint to dry into the textured surface. I also include metallic powders, metallic foil, metal flakes and other objects such as feathers, broken glass and dried flower petals in the wet paint or imbedded in the gesso. The image is then laid over this complex background in several layers, and sealed with a series of varnish applications. (View The Process PDF) Another artist recently described my large, heavily textured and thickly painted canvases as "reading like the flesh of Rembrandt's mother." He continued: "The subjects' features are worn, etched by time, painfully familiar with tragedy, yet fully present and economically described."  

 An interesting observation concerning the evolution of my work, and a driving force, was realizing that each new painting answers different questions and makes other answers less important. 

  -Mollie Kellogg  

 

Mollie Kellogg   858.449.0548   artist@molliekellogg.com   review   galleries   resume