Kelly DeFayette

This is one of the last of a group of large works that Kelly made using spray paint and custom building her own panels. She had to give up my painting studio due to the pandemic and is now working out of her tiny apartment in the TL. This means that she can only work on small pieces, have the woodworking completed by someone else and have made the switch to acrylics. It has been a pretty big shift, and she doesn’t know when she'll be able to get a painting studio again, but she’s adjusting well for the time being. Kelly works on wood panels in shapes that vary from the traditional, to circles, and then irregular and tessellating polygons. Very process driven, the shape of the panel informs the palette and the decisions of application. Exploring color is the focus, and the intersection of the craft of the object, the painting materials, and the palette chosen, result in the final piece. Moving from smaller tessellating works towards larger installations and groups of irregular shapes, she continues to push towards a more sculptural finish and to remove evidence of the makers hand from the finished work. Kelly’s work is included in the following collections: Morgan Stanley, New York; Morgan Stanley, San Francisco; Influencer 50, San Francisco/London; Vendini, San Francisco; Martin Building Company, San Francisco Mint Plaza; and Stanford. She has lived in San Francisco since 1997