Kelly Sawyer is a painter. This was not always the case. Well, perhaps it was but she didn’t always know
it. This all changed in 2017 when she decided or was compelled, to turn a life-long fascination and
flirtation with the art form into a personal engagement with it. But, before she was a painter (or before she
was aware that she was one), she was many things. She was a granddaughter of Colorado homesteaders;
the eldest daughter of a teenage mother; sister to four younger sisters and a brother; a graduate of Barnes
School of Business in Denver; personal secretary to a beer magnate; and, for a (very) short time, an ill-
fated employee at an ice cream shop.
She was the wife of a carpenter and she was a pioneer, of sorts, moving west and making a home
out of a house built from the tall timber growing on the land they had purchased there. Though this land
was without telephone, electrical or water utilities, it did have a view of the harsh, strikingly beautiful
coast of southern Oregon and a spring with water that tasted sweet. It was also surrounded by mysterious
forests, open meadows, and abandoned orchards in which the bodies and imaginations of her growing
family could roam. She was the devoted mother of four boys, whom she raised into men.
She was also an immigrant. She moved to Australia, where she worked as a potter and basket-
maker. She had her own studio. In the back, she made her own glazes and kiln-fired the works she shaped
and later sold in the front. This studio was centrally located in a small historic town in Western Australia,
next to her house, built from stone quarried and lain by convict laborers in the nineteenth century. It was
here that her last son was born. Since returning to America, she has worked several jobs, for companies
both large and small, mostly in her adopted home of New Mexico. She never lost her interest in art, even
though there were long periods in which she found little time to make any
She has been many things before; she is some of these things still. But, now she is most definitely
a painter. As such, she is driven to explore the tensions between the possibilities offered by color, form,
and texture in her chosen medium of acrylic on canvas and her abiding dedication to elegance in expression
and tasteful composition. The evidence of this ongoing exploration is the paintings you see here.

Paul T. Sawyer