Kelly Eden has lived a life worthy of the art she aspires to create: dramatic, layered, vibrant, and unexpectedly meaningful.
When she was 17, she enrolled in the Denver School of the Arts and fell in love with oil painting. She was only there for a short time before graduating and moving to Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
There, she honed her skills as a painter and, in some ways, as a model for her fellow artists, designing a very effective social-media presence for herself. Her online presence was so compelling that it quickly went viral, attracting much attention to Kelly and her work.
She graced magazine covers as an alternative model, generating a lot of interest in the “tattoo pastel” aesthetic she represented at the time. Several magazines spreads featured an intriguing double feature with Kelly’s paintings alongside photographs of herself. She leveraged her artistic fame into a role as an “influencer” and a successful YouTube personality. But after nearly ten years of that life, Kelly was compelled to quit because of the constant stress, self-doubt, and online abuse she was receiving.
“Eventually, with a new appreciation for therapy, she began to rediscover her partially neglected first love: painting,” explains Kelly. She now uses paint to shape the good and bad notions that have filled her life with self-compelling significance.
Kelly Eden has found some of her artistic purposes by reveling in the specifics of the color wheel and color theory as someone who rejects bland, titanium white.
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,” says Kelly. Instead, she paints on aluminum composite panels over a base of N5 grey, focusing on the complex relationships between the many colors she employs and the interesting purities within them.
She paints in a realistic, time-consuming style, focusing on lighting and context. Thematically, she has begun to concentrate on evocative portraits of imagined women who represent the “saints” and “spirits” who have shaped her fascinating life.
Kelly had spent most of her life disconnected from religious thoughts and feelings. As a result, when she discovered a calling within herself to paint figures called “Mother Lithium” or “Primordial Debt,” the process gradually revealed to her a deep and unnamed link between her life path and something beyond.
Kelly’s year’s highlights have been featured in NETFLIX’s “Amazing Interiors series,” being accepted into the Salmagundi Club, and being an Artefex Featured Artist.
Kelly’s artistic vision—both very specific in its imagery and very open in its metaphors—has brought her strengths together into a mature solidity due to these figures’ mixtures of the positive and the negative, the modern and the ancient.