GELLATLY

Drawing will never be the same for me...........after that last drawing.

Born in Connecticut, raised on New England, Gellatly has been living and working in Miami for the last 6 years. He has exhibited throughout New England and New York in both solo and group shows, and has continued that practice in Florida. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant, and numerous state Individual Artist Grants; CT, MA,. He has also been the recipient of several full fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center (twice), to the Millay Artist Colony, NY, and was granted a 2 year project-residency at the Deering Estate, Miami, FL. Gellatly has also been working as a freelance illustrator for the past 25 years, and has taught art intermittently throughout the years to every academic level and ages.                                        

...... and they all got together in a little row boat

Gellatly's exhibit @ Laundromat, Little Haiti, Miami Sept. 2017) assembled a large group of photographs, a few paintings, and a number of drawings. 

His characters make poetically odd connections - juxtaposing meanings, identities, and personas among this shifting planet and our role on it.. In Gellatly’s hybridizing method of depiction, he constructs surreal stand-ins for aspects of humanity, in this case - refugees, using  outfitted gourds (large, anthropomorphically flesh-colored vegetables).  His once darkly erotic creatures have been exhumed from the depths of their indulgences, and in a mixed-metaphor move, he’s positioned them among flotillas of icebergs, at once becoming refugees in a contemporary narrative. These gourd personas, now alongside the artist’s equally hybridized icebergs -  new neighbors/bellwethers/ambassadors/and celebrities for global warming and sea level rise, exposed their beauty and vulnerabilities the universal. Gellatly chums for compassion, both in the human, and in the environment. 

Gellatly’s a maker, and where it comes to his art practice, his hands are in everything. He continues to develop new iconography for every step he takes. As a teacher, he’s written across his classroom wall -  ‘In order to live in a new world, we must speak in a new language’. His art moves in this model. His process is cyclical - moving organically from form to form, medium to medium, fiction to nonfiction, round and round and…  and in so doing, allows himself to enter this wheel, his process, with tools in hand, at any contextual point and method of making.

His current constructions at once ephemeral and concrete, are made on tabletop, somewhat diorama settings, small and intimate, scaled to the economical proportions of his space, time, and materials at hand. These building sites are filmic in nature, each becoming sculpture, theatrical stagings for photo, documentation, become shifting sets with mercurial narratives, all in an ongoing play. His photographs hold the evidence, others inspire drawings - fleshing out specific narratives, that in term feed back into the assemblage process, prompting more photographs, shaping painting, moving drawing toward more imagery, ………

When taking the practice outside the studio....

when the snow carves like Styrofoam....when the brilliance of white unconditionally accepts color........    In 2015, Gellatly spent the month of February as a resident at the Vermont Studio Center. There in below zero temperatures for most of the month, on the face of a wall of snow, he performed a fictionally based archeological dig - one to find, and then exhume, the illusive Ice Plant, a tubular construction built with frozen ink-colored water balloons. Along a 20 ft. snow drift, during a 2 week period, he moved through the enactment and discovery of archeology, passing next to the uncovering of Abstraction, to an unexpected run-in with early language. By the time the performance was working to a close, he was treating the whole as painting.