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 5 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.                                        

In this new work Gellatly’s making drawings based on constructions/tabletop dioramas he initially builds from styrofoam, clay, and photo chards (his own from earlier constructions) in an intoxicated response to the magnificence of icebergs, and our relationship to it. With his most recent photographs and drawings, he's staging plays that cast the landscape as the character, not as the setting. For these works, icebergs are the actors, and like their cycle - forming from water, becoming a floating sculptural mass reflected, then returning to water, he directly correlates this cyclical process with his own picture/object making practice. Using a variety of drawing tools, the drawings form from mark making - some indicating form, others verging on sign/symbol/language, along with straight out rendering.

When taking the practice outside the studio.... when the snow carves like buttery Styrofoam....when the brilliance of white snow  unconditionally accepts the color........ In 2015, I spent the month of February as a resident at the Vermont Studio Center. There in below zero temperatures for most of the month, I 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, I 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, I was treating the whole as painting.