Explore the vibrant world of Kelly Eddington, a watercolor artist blending hyper-realistic detail and vivid colors, inspired by her love for U2 and the spirit of rock music.
When Watercolor Goes Rock
The fact that Kelly Eddington was an avid U2 fan was clear from the passion with which she worked on a website dedicated to fans of the Irish rock band from 2002 to 2020 and created her own when that website folded. What was surprising, however, was to discover that U2 was also the driving force that led her to delve into the world of portraiture with an entirely new approach to the use of watercolor.
A native of west-central Illinois, Kelly lives literally “in the woods” in her unconventional house near Lake Mark Twain in northeast Missouri, with her inseparable husband Jeff and their cat, Pooj.
She says nearly two decades of teaching at the high school level have made her a better artist. In 2010, she decided to pursue her art career full time and she is now a member of many watercolor societies, including the Transparent Watercolor Society of America and the Watercolor Honor Society.
Kelly is well known for her paintings and cartoons, which have won awards and recognition and are held and shown in private and public collections worldwide, including the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Little Museum of Dublin. The latter bought two of her paintings dedicated to the Irish rock band U2, which are on display in their U2 room. “Oh, that’s so cool. Isn’t that brilliant?” was Bono’s comment when he saw her work.
With a background in realism and a particular abstract streak that leads her to experiment, Kelly paints portraits, flowers, jewelry settings, and anything else that is complex, laborious, and rich in detail.
Details are emphasized by her innovative use of color, which is reminiscent of the strobe lights that illuminate the stage at concerts. She has managed to bring out the purity of watercolor and its complexity as the result of an overlapping work of light layers of color, skillfully and patiently applied one on top of the other until the desired intensity is achieved with the use of bright colors, in a continuous back and forth from background to foreground.
Technically, the artist creates her compositions from an idea that wakes her up in the middle of the night or catches her in the middle of a film. She then develops the idea by incorporating, for example, similar objects made of different materials, which she manages to reproduce realistically and truthfully on paper.
The secret of this precision lies not only in her knowledge of the basics, but also in the importance Kelly attaches to her work as an artist. “I’m not the kind of painter who waits for inspiration. I just treat it as a job,” she says, admitting that the key is daily practice, even on a small piece of paper.
The focus of her current work is portraiture. “There is a kind of magic in making something look real, in making a face have an expression and an emotion,” says the artist, who mixes realism with a great sense of abstract expressionism. “I go through life; I just look at things and I see colors that I mix in my mind.”
Her favorite subjects are the faces of those she loves which she expresses by working with different media. An example of this is the painting of her father, created using the beam of light from a projector. The artist’s use of color makes the composition fresh and convincing, even though it is very personal and emotional in nature.
The same applies to the series of self-portraits and the “Menomorphosis Series,” in which the representation of herself, often fragmented, is nothing other than the concrete elaboration of a mental process following a physical change due to the natural process of menopause. A concept that the artist proudly and loudly proclaims: “Menopause does not sanction the end of anything,” and the exuberant colors she uses to make this concept clear reinforce its meaning.
Kelly has been in love with watercolor since the age of seventeen, when she secretly borrowed her three-year-old sister’s paints. Her palette consists of a maximum of 15 colors, which she occasionally supplements with some special colors that she manages to incorporate well into her palette, such as Arylide Yellow, also known as Hansa Yellow.
She says the paper she uses – 300mg Strathmore paper – allows her to push watercolor to its limits, so she can build up the composition slowly, layer by layer, taking care to let it dry between each layer.
Her compositional process begins with ideas and what the artist calls “subroutines,” i.e. subconscious processes that respond to voluntary commands from her brain before she sleeps and that work within her during sleep to provide solutions to an idea, a title, or a response in general. She tends to exaggerate her use of color because, as she herself admits, “any excuse to use pure color is good, something about it just gives me pleasure.”
Kelly’s paintings are an infectious explosion of unusual color that, like a hypnotic whirlpool, draws the viewer’s gaze into her paintings, so infinitely different and strong, rich in textures, complex and hyper-realistic details, sometimes composed of prismatic angles.
Be inspired by Kelly Eddington and her use of color, as she will be among the fifth edition of Watercolor Live, online January 22-24, 2025, with an Essential Techniques Day on January 21: WatercolorLive.com.
Browse more articles on figurative art and artists here at RealismToday.com.
Brilliant artist!