Giobany Arévalo > Gabriela Torres Olivares >Anuar Jalife - Literal

David Lida
A Painter
Reads a City
Taxi bajo el puente
Not long ago, while sitting in an outdoor
café a couple of blocks from the Alameda of
Santa María la Ribera, painter Phil Kelly heard
a scream. It came from a woman sitting at
an adjacent table, whose purse had been
snatched. Despite the fact that Kelly has not
enjoyed the best of health in recent years, he
decided to rally and give chase.
“I got halfway down the street and was
catching up to the guy,” says the painter
with a complacent smile. “He took out a
gun and began to shoot at me. Luckily, he
wasn’t a very good shot.” At that point, Kelly
thought it prudent to fi nd the nearest corner
as quickly as possible, and turn it.
The understated insouciance with which
Kelly describes this incident is typical of his
subtle, charming and often enigmatic sense
of humor. The artist is an Irishman raised in
England who came to Mexico City in the early
1980s and became nationalized in 1994. But
Kelly, 58, is bald with a pate
the color of raw veal. He
tends to dress in clothes stai-
ned with all the colors of the
rainbow, mismatched socks
and heavy black shoes, also
blemished with paint. His im-
pressionist canvases absorb
the chaos of the city and so-
mehow make it attractive.
that sentence doesn’t even begin to explain
the artist’s relationship with the city where he
found not only a home but a theme for his
work, a public that responds to it, a wife and
a family.
Kelly, 58, is bald with a pate the color of
raw veal. He tends to dress in clothes stained
with all the colors of the rainbow, mismatched
socks and heavy black shoes, also blemished
48 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2009
with paint. His impressionist canvases absorb
the chaos of the city and somehow make it
attractive–a huge sky of toxic beige (or pink or
orange), the speeding crowds around boulevards
and monuments like the Angel of Independence,
Paseo de la Reforma, or the Torre
Mayor. Here and there will be the yellow barriers
of the Circuito Interior, a Volkswagen taxi,
a tree asphyxiated by smog. The artist is also
known to paint places as diverse as the desert
in Hermosillo, Dublin’s River Liffey or the Hotel
De Ville in Paris. But there is no doubt that
his greatest and most constant inspiration has
been Mexico City.
The painter has often said that he arrived
here with fi fty dollars in his pocket, half
of which he spent on a hotel room. Once
ensconced in these quarters, he opened the
Yellow Pages and searched for schools that
taught English. By the end of the day, he had
not only a job but an apartment, as one of the
other teachers was looking for a roommate.
Already fl uent in English and French, at
the time Kelly spoke no Spanish, so he began
a process that he describes as “reading the
city.” He explains that he worked long hours,
giving classes in the remotest parts of the urban
sprawl. “I walked, I traveled by metro or
combi, I went all over town to the places no
one else wanted to go. And I began to read
the streets. The physical way in which people
existed day by day. The yellow taxis and the
palm trees were obsessions, emblems that
for me refl ected the exuberance and the
freshness of the city.”
It would take years of struggle before
Kelly found success. Indeed, the painter, now
fi fty-eight, was close to forty before he began
to eke out a living from his work. He had so
many temporary jobs on the road to accomplishment–including
milkman, truck driver,
and movie extra–that he probably doesn’t
even remember all of them.
Today, he sells as many paintings as he
can produce–and he is very productive. In
November he will have an exhibition at the
art gallery at UAM Azcapotzalco, to celebrate
the thirty-fi fth anniversary of the university
and the tenth of the gallery. Although he is
represented by no gallery in Mexico City–his
wife, Ruth Munguía, handles the business
aspect of his work–he has exhibited all over
the city, including solo shows in El Museo de
Arte Moderno and El Museo de la Ciudad
de México. (He is represented by galleries in
London and Dublin.)