The City as Obsessed Mapa de la ciudad You Can’t Be a Painter If You’re Not Curious Phil Kelly Images courtesy of the artist / Photos: Bernardo Arcos Mijailidis OTOÑO, 2009 LITERAL. VOCES LATINOAMERICANAS 47
David Lida A Painter Reads a City Taxi bajo el puente Not long ago, while sitting in an outdoor café a couple of blocks from the Alameda of Santa María la Ribera, painter Phil Kelly heard a scream. It came from a woman sitting at an adjacent table, whose purse had been snatched. Despite the fact that Kelly has not enjoyed the best of health in recent years, he decided to rally and give chase. “I got halfway down the street and was catching up to the guy,” says the painter with a complacent smile. “He took out a gun and began to shoot at me. Luckily, he wasn’t a very good shot.” At that point, Kelly thought it prudent to fi nd the nearest corner as quickly as possible, and turn it. The understated insouciance with which Kelly describes this incident is typical of his subtle, charming and often enigmatic sense of humor. The artist is an Irishman raised in England who came to Mexico City in the early 1980s and became nationalized in 1994. But Kelly, 58, is bald with a pate the color of raw veal. He tends to dress in clothes stai- ned with all the colors of the rainbow, mismatched socks and heavy black shoes, also blemished with paint. His im- pressionist canvases absorb the chaos of the city and so- mehow make it attractive. that sentence doesn’t even begin to explain the artist’s relationship with the city where he found not only a home but a theme for his work, a public that responds to it, a wife and a family. Kelly, 58, is bald with a pate the color of raw veal. He tends to dress in clothes stained with all the colors of the rainbow, mismatched socks and heavy black shoes, also blemished 48 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2009 with paint. His impressionist canvases absorb the chaos of the city and somehow make it attractive–a huge sky of toxic beige (or pink or orange), the speeding crowds around boulevards and monuments like the Angel of Independence, Paseo de la Reforma, or the Torre Mayor. Here and there will be the yellow barriers of the Circuito Interior, a Volkswagen taxi, a tree asphyxiated by smog. The artist is also known to paint places as diverse as the desert in Hermosillo, Dublin’s River Liffey or the Hotel De Ville in Paris. But there is no doubt that his greatest and most constant inspiration has been Mexico City. The painter has often said that he arrived here with fi fty dollars in his pocket, half of which he spent on a hotel room. Once ensconced in these quarters, he opened the Yellow Pages and searched for schools that taught English. By the end of the day, he had not only a job but an apartment, as one of the other teachers was looking for a roommate. Already fl uent in English and French, at the time Kelly spoke no Spanish, so he began a process that he describes as “reading the city.” He explains that he worked long hours, giving classes in the remotest parts of the urban sprawl. “I walked, I traveled by metro or combi, I went all over town to the places no one else wanted to go. And I began to read the streets. The physical way in which people existed day by day. The yellow taxis and the palm trees were obsessions, emblems that for me refl ected the exuberance and the freshness of the city.” It would take years of struggle before Kelly found success. Indeed, the painter, now fi fty-eight, was close to forty before he began to eke out a living from his work. He had so many temporary jobs on the road to accomplishment–including milkman, truck driver, and movie extra–that he probably doesn’t even remember all of them. Today, he sells as many paintings as he can produce–and he is very productive. In November he will have an exhibition at the art gallery at UAM Azcapotzalco, to celebrate the thirty-fi fth anniversary of the university and the tenth of the gallery. Although he is represented by no gallery in Mexico City–his wife, Ruth Munguía, handles the business aspect of his work–he has exhibited all over the city, including solo shows in El Museo de Arte Moderno and El Museo de la Ciudad de México. (He is represented by galleries in London and Dublin.)
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