Artwork and story from Cindy Kelly
I started selling acrylic paintings in high school. These were works I created using photographs; many from National Geographic magazine. At that point, I was mostly self-taught. My father encouraged me to go to college and was excited when I was accepted into the School of Visual Arts in New York. However, he passed away before he would see me off to my first semester there. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to continue studying in New York and ended up going to a state school I could afford. This was a big disappointment but I graduated in 1988 with a degree in printmaking from Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University. I settled on printmaking because I loved the idea of art being available to more people at an affordable price through limited editions. However, I always lamented that I was never really taught ‘how’ to draw or paint. We were just given assignments to complete and while I didn’t realize it at the time, courses were a mishmash of mediums with no foundation in developing more basic skills.