Giobany Arévalo > Gabriela Torres Olivares >Anuar Jalife - Literal

While Kelly’s standard canvas measures
about one meter by 1.20, lately, he has been
commissioned to work in larger formats–
with dimensions as large as 300 cm by 500
cm–for diverse clients, including restaurants,
hotels and government offi ces. “There is an
increasing awareness that painting works
well in these places,” says the artist. “Like in
Ireland or in Europe, it’s becoming part of the
budget when they build a new building. The
constructors fi gure it into the costs. They are
putting a minimum amount into real painting
and not an inexpensive print of a Barbie
doll,” he adds, offering a direct gibe to the
conceptual art that has been so popular in
Mexico City in recent years, and which has
left him unimpressed.
When working on large canvases, he
tapes a brush to the end of the pole of a
broom to get to the highest parts. “You could
probably spend a lot of money on expensive
brushes if you wanted to,” he says. For the
lowest parts, he says, “I just lean down as if I
were cleaning a toilet.”
Recently, Kelly has suffered from various
ailments including hepatitis and liver disease,
unrelieved by a lifetime of heavy drinking.
One of the complications is that it has become
more diffi cult for him to get around
the city, and to the cantinas that served as a
constant inspiration. The danger, he admits,
is that “we become less receptive, we get
stale or old. Since I can’t walk so much as
before, the process of osmosis, of picking up
things wherever you go, is more limited.
“I can’t stop off at bars like I used to.
And even if I wanted to, so many places
where I used to go don’t exist any longer.”
He mentions El Nivel, the cantina with the
oldest license in Mexico City, which closed its
doors in 2007, as “a focal point.”
“I used to show up there, after walking
from the house, at eleven in the morning or
perhaps a little later, not long after they’d
opened up. There was hardly anyone there.
I would sit in the corner and draw and talk
to the waiters, who would try to force huge
botanas on me. They would always ask me to
show them my socks. It was like a ritual.
“You can’t be a painter if you’re not curious
about your surroundings. What I very
consciously try to do is to fi nd something ev-
ery day. The color of a truck. The way that
someone crosses the street. The garbage
trucks, two in a row going down the boulevard.
Or the steam coming from a vat of
tamales.”
His current challenges are perhaps par
for the course for a life that was mostly spent
struggling. “Getting there was so hard,” he
says. “I had this incredible drive, almost an
obsession. Life is so impossible. Everybody,
especially the Brits, are terrible. My father
and my schoolteachers all said I would be a
failure and I would never make it. My father
said I wouldn’t be a painter, that I would be
a drunk on the street corner. So I said, ‘ok,
bye bye.’ I did anything and everything for
survival.”
“I could never have done advanced degrees.
I was too intent to get on and do it.
If you need to learn, there are always museums
and books. And you can fi nd painters
you admire and knock on their doors and ask
them how they do it.”
OTOÑO, 2009 LITERAL. VOCES LATINOAMERICANAS 51