Colleen Kelsey – Statement

My research for the Puritan Series began with my mother's suggestion that I
paint religious paintings. Since art has little to no significance within my
mother's evangelical faith, I followed the history of American Christian art
until I found their artistic inheritance made evident in works made by
Christian colonists in the North American English Colonies. During this
period, and within the mores of this society, the allowable artistic subject
was portraiture. The Christian colonists believed that to mimic nature was
blasphemous. Rather than mirroring nature, their paintings were genealogical
documents of procreative greatness.

My research led me to the works of John Singleton Copley, a schooled painter
who was considered an outsider by the British Academy , John Brewster, Jr., a
self-taught deaf artist whose paintings were his sole means of
communication, and James Sanford Ellsworth, whose paintings supported his
religious endeavors while he lived the life of an itinerant horseback
preacher. Through these artists' paintings, I developed a dialogue. I became
the small child in the Copley, no longer the depiction of the passive "seen
and not heard" child, but rather a stoic Shepard of the sheep.  By taking
these sources and recontextualizing them by way of my personal visual
vocabulary they become my own.