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MEDIUM: Oil SPECIALTY: ✔ Technique
I facilitate modern painting techniques in realism/representational. Focusing on still life, figurative and portraiture. My mentorship group will demonstrate the pillars of realism: texture, color, depth, value, composition, and structure. We do this in baby steps, using a slow, thoughtful approach to the subject matter.
My work delves into the intricate connections we hold with the core elements of our existence: our bodies, souls, genders, appearances, ages, and the fleeting nature of life itself. Central facets of our being are thrust upon us without choice, that we either embrace our assigned role or endure an endless drain of psychic vitality. I often find myself resisting the confines of these predetermined roles, grappling with a dissonance between societal expectations, alienation, and my own identity.
Kelly’s EXPERTISE
Listed below are this Mentor’s specialty skills. Join this group if you want to grow in these areas.
Specialty: ✔ Technical
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Colour and Composition
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Technique Demos
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Teaching How to Self Critique
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Providing Art Critiques
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Supplies and Tools – what to use, where to save, and where to spend
“Mastrius is a perfect balance of accountability, community and fun. It feels like family. Family that makes you a better you.” ~ Elizabeth, Emerging Artist
JOIN NOW
select your mentorship group
If the group you’re interested in has a waitlist, you have the option to join another group to get started. When your group opens we can transfer you over.
Aspiring
Mentorship Membership
$ USD64/Month
Next session: May 21, 2024
On the 3rd Tuesday of every month 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM MDT Tue
COMING SOON Join the waitlist to receive an email when this group becomes available.
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MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kelly Eden has lived a life worthy of the kind of art that she seeks to make: dramatic, layered, vibrant, and unexpectedly meaningful. She fell in love with oil paints at the age of 17, when she enrolled in the Denver School of the Arts. She was there only briefly before graduating and heading to the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. There, she honed her skills both as a painter and, in a way, as a painting: she modeled for her fellow artists and designed a very effective social-media presence for herself. That online presence, in fact, was so compelling that it soon went viral, drawing an enormous amount of attention to Kelly and her work. As an alternative model, she graced magazine covers and generated a lot of interest in the “tattoo pastel” aesthetic that she represented at the time. Multiple magazine spreads featured an interesting double feature: Kelly’s paintings, alongside photographs of Kelly herself. She was able to parlay her artistic fame into an “influencer” role and a successful YouTube channel. After nearly ten years of that life, though… the constant stress, self-doubt, and online abuse coming Kelly’s way absolutely forced her to leave it behind. Eventually, with a new appreciation for therapy, she began to rediscover her partially neglected first love: painting. Now, she uses paint to give form to the ideas—both good and bad—that have filled her life with self-compelling significance.
As a person who absolutely rejects bland, titanium white, Kelly Eden has found some of her artistic purpose by reveling in the specifics of the color wheel and in color theory. Life, as she sees it, simply has no room for the fluorescent washout of “pure” white—or for the rough, impermanent “tradition” of canvas as a medium. Instead, she paints on aluminum composite panels over a base of N5 gray, with an eye for bringing out the complex relationships among, and the interesting purities within, the many colors she uses. She paints in a realistic, labor-intensive style that puts emphasis on lighting and context. Thematically, she has begun to focus on evocative portraits of imagined women who represent the “saints” and the “spirits” that have shaped her very interesting life. Kelly had felt disconnected from religious thought and feeling for most of her life… and so, when she found a calling within herself to paint figures called “Mother Lithium” or “Primordial Debt,” the process slowly has revealed to her a deep and unnamed link between her path in life and something beyond. These figures’ mixtures of the positive and the negative, the modern and the ancient, have allowed Kelly’s artistic vision—which is both very specific in its imagery and very open in its metaphors—to bring her strengths together into a mature solidity.
