RYAN KELLY IS SUCH A NICE GUY TO TALK TO. HE’S
DISARMINGLY SELF-DEPRECATING and soft-spoken; his wit is dry and usually
at his own expense. Given the
high-caliber
impact of his paintings and comics, his
easygoing demeanor took me aback. You’ll know what I mean when you browse
through Kelly’s work: his most effective paintings are
politically
charged punches in the gut, some with an
accessible,
surreal
narrative, others that serve as tangled,
epic
visual morality tales reminiscent of
nothing so much as
Hieronymus
Bosch’s medieval
triptychs.
Kelly’s paintings invite the viewer to a universe filled with cherub-faced
menace and pulp sci-fi delights, where
doe-eyed,
chubby-cheeked girls pack heat or
bring
on an apocalypse. Appealingly strange and
wonderful as his paintings are, Kelly’s day-job inking and drawing for comics
is what he’s best known for. His
boldly
rendered comics artwork has earned him
national acclaim and steady work with the powerhouse comics publisher
DC/Vertigo.


 Given all
that, Kelly’s beginnings as a painter were less auspicious than you’d expect.
“When I was a kid, I taught myself to paint by copying National
Geographic photos and painting them, matching the colors by eye. I was
trying to render in painting exactly what was in the photo… It was a really
time-consuming process, so I guess I was kind of a loser as a kid .
I spent a lot of time copying and painting photographs up alone in my room.
Later, I found Warhol and Basquiat, and I my painting got a little looser,
weirder. I think my work now kind of combines all of that. I really like speed
painting, putting all those influences right next to each other, smacking them
into each other without thinking it out too much, to see what happens.”


 What about
the politics behind his art? “Each piece feels to me like a stand-alone
political punk song. I hear about something in the news that gets me angry, I
think about it, and then I paint it. They’re almost like illustrations or an
opinion pieces. That’s a little scary for an artist, because those are really
hard to sell. People might really love them, but they don’t necessarily need
to have them in their living room. But, since I’m getting gallery shows, I
want to take that opportunity and use it, I want my art to say
something.”


 Kelly didn’t
have any career confusion. “I pretty much knew I wanted to be an artist as
early as high school,” Kelly says. “I was doing comics and painting even
then.” Art school was the obvious path, and Kelly graduated from Minneapolis
College of Art and Design in 1998, with a degree in Illustration. “I wanted to
make art that meant something, but I also wanted to make a living at it. So,
instead of really deciding between illustration, fine art, and comics drawing,
I just did them all.”


 How did that
work out?  “I got totally burned out. It’s been eight years
since I graduated from MCAD, and I’m only now narrowing things down a little.
But I find myself turning down most of the jobs that actually pay money—like
to design shower curtains or something, which might involve coming up with 80
illustrations for $10,000. I mean, wow, that’s a lot of money! But what am I
doing? I’m working on a painting right now that I’ll show in a gallery and, if
it sells, it’ll make like $600. After hours and hours of work, it’s not a good
payoff financially.” 


 So, like a
lot of artists, Kelly walks a tightrope: “I love doing it, but with painting
even if you work hard and put your guts into it, realistically, you still
don’t know that it’ll sell. Even though I know the cost, I guess, so far, I’ve
been choosing jobs with less money but more artistic control.”


 On the
relationships of “pop art” to “fine art” or of comics to literature, Kelly
doesn’t see much difference, ultimately. “I take more of a big tent view,” he
explains. “I think it’s great that ‘pop art’ is being accepted on a bigger
level as fine art, and that comics are becoming popular with a broader
audience. It’s just a matter of familiarity. Manga has really helped
bring comics to a wider group of people in recent years. In spite of the
stereotypes, it’s not just older men reading comics. In Japan, everybody reads
comics and that’s becoming increasingly the case here, too.”


 Like lots of
kids coming of age in the ’80s and early ’90s, Kelly got turned on to comics
by not only mainstream superhero fare, but also by reading
indie
strips like
Dark
Horse’s Concrete, or
Cerebus
and (long before they were action figures and Saturday cartoons)
Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles. “I really liked the darker stuff like
Frank
Miller,
R.
Crumb,
Art
Spiegelman’s Maus,” Kelly
explains. “I was probably 14 or 15 when I read these more complex, independent
comics and it broadened my view of the field. These strips aren’t at all
frivolous—they’re high art with mature, sophisticated ideas. I actually think
that’s why I like comics—the experiences, the narratives, the complexity of
the characters. I could relate. I loved comics, but I was always most
interested in those artists working in comics whose stuff seemed like it would
also be at home in a gallery somewhere. I loved
Dave
McKean’s work for that reason. I actually
thought I wanted to be a painter when I went to college.”


 In fact, for
Kelly, his paintings and his artwork for comics are part of the same
continuum. “One’s a book you hold in your hand, the other’s a book that sits
on the wall. I don’t want the painting to be something people just glance at
and pass by. My paintings are layered and complex because I want a viewer to
linger with it and have to navigate it a little, really spend some time. On
the one hand, painting frees you from the linear narrative, and the viewer has
a bit more choice with interpretation. Comics, as a medium, don’t allow as
much interplay. On the other hand, though, comics allow more room for ongoing
complexity. And I’ve taken a lot of cues from comics for my paintings: bright
colors, action lines, and exaggerated features. But more and more now, I ink
like I paint. Even when I ink, I see layers. All the things I do when
I paint, I use the brush the same way.”


 When his
pieces are finished, Kelly doesn’t linger over them. “For me, the work belongs
to someone else once it’s done. I see the work as a product. Maybe it’s
because I’m unhappy with, like, 90% of what I do. When I finish one thing, I
just want to start the next project so I can do it better. I want to keep
changing, doing something different. I see some of my friends who do the same
thing year after year, because they have an audience that loves what they do.
That feels kind of like a trap to me. I want to be flexible, to learn and work
and try new things.”


 In fact, he’s
spending more and more time thinking about a comic that exists only in his
head, one he calls Funrama. “Funrama is my own, and maybe the
most important story I have to tell. But I’d have to sit down at my desk and
create it on spec. And I’d have to write it . It takes me
so long to do that. I can make art much faster. I’m such a
perfectionist about writing, and I think it’s a really good story so I want to
get it just right. You know how Guns ‘n Roses has taken, like, fifteen or
twenty years to come out with a new album? That’s what this is like.
Maybe later I can put out my own book.”


 For now,
Kelly has his hands full with three small kids (twin 5 month-olds and another
one preschool age) and a series of gigs drawing for existing comics series
like Oni Press’s ongoing indie strip Local, and DC/Vertigo titles
like American Virgin and Lucifer. And he’s already planning more
paintings for next year, so I expect that’ll more than fill whatever breathing
room this deservedly busy artist finds for himself in the coming months. Keep
your eye out for Ryan Kelly’s work—either in comics or in gallery shows around
town. He’s one to watch.


--Susannah Schouweiler

Ryan Kelly's mnartists.org Homepage
See the full gallery of Kelly's arresting work

Ryan Kelly's blog
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Susannah Schouweiler on mnartists.org

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