By Mike Savage of New Canaan, CT | mikesavagenewcanaancollections.com
There is a moment that every serious collector knows well. You are standing in front of a work of art and something shifts inside you — some quiet internal gear engages — and you understand, almost without thinking, that you are in the presence of something you need to own.
That moment happened to me with Michael John Kelly.
I have been fortunate to build what I consider a genuinely adventurous collection — over 40 artists whose work spans photography, painting, sculpture, and everything in between. I have written about my deep admiration for the boxing paintings of Ushio Shinohara, whose visceral, physical art has gripped me since I first encountered it. I have explored the dreamlike figurative compositions of Farrar Hood Cusomato, a painter whose command of the human figure borders on the uncanny.
But Michael John Kelly occupies his own unique territory in my collection — a space where the digital and the analog coexist, where the image is simultaneously constructed and destroyed, where a painting asks you to reckon with how we see rather than simply what we see.
A Practice Built on Productive Tension
Kelly was born in Provo, Utah, in 1975. He earned his BFA in Painting and Drawing from Brigham Young University in 2004, and went on to complete his MFA in Painting and Drawing from UCLA in 2013. That trajectory — from a deeply traditional fine arts education in Utah to one of the most demanding graduate programs in contemporary art — tells you something important about who this artist is. He is not someone who discarded craft in favor of concept. He mastered both, then put them in dialogue with each other.
Kelly’s process is genuinely unusual and, once you understand it, impossible to forget. He begins by building compositions digitally — abstracting source images, layering them, combining them with other found imagery on the computer. He then prints those digital compositions out, cuts the prints by hand, and physically rearranges them on the panel. Over and into this collaged substrate, he paints: oil sticks, spray paint, acrylic, and traditional oil paint all find their way into the same surface. The result is a painting that carries its own history visibly within it — you can feel the accumulation of decisions, the back-and-forth between the calculated and the intuitive.
What I find remarkable is that Kelly’s work refuses to let you settle on a single reading. Is this a painting? A photograph? A collage? A print? The honest answer is that it is all of these things at once, and that refusal to be categorized is precisely the point. The surface of a Kelly work holds multiple kinds of reality in tension — the machine-produced and the handmade, the flat and the textural, the deliberate and the accidental.
Darklands and the Language of the Overlooked
Kelly’s 2016 solo exhibition Darklands at Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles announced to the broader art world that this was an artist operating at full power. The large-scale works in that show — including We Lived Our Lives In Black and Making Love On The Edge Of A Knife, both oil, acrylic, and pigment print collage on panel at roughly 80 by 70 inches — demonstrated the full scale of his ambition. These are physically imposing works. You do not so much look at them as occupy the same space they do.
The exhibition title itself is instructive. Darklands is a term that carries connotations of the untamed, the hidden, the marginal — places outside the official map. Kelly’s source material has always drawn from the overlooked and the culturally peripheral: imagery that circulates at the edges of mainstream attention, fragments of visual culture that most viewers absorb without consciously processing. By isolating these fragments, recombining them, and then intervening with the direct physicality of paint, Kelly forces a reckoning. He asks: what do these images actually mean when you slow down and look?
This is a question I find myself returning to often as a collector. The best contemporary art does not simply decorate a wall; it changes the way you think about looking. Kelly’s work does this in the most direct way possible — by literally constructing and deconstructing the image in front of you, leaving the seams visible.
The Intelligence of the Surface
One of the things that draws me most strongly to Kelly’s work is the intelligence of his surfaces. He is, at his core, a supremely skilled painter — the UCLA MFA produced a technician of the first order — and that skill is what allows the conceptual ambitions of his practice to succeed. A less accomplished painter using the same methods would produce incoherence. Kelly produces something stranger and more compelling: images that feel both deliberately composed and genuinely discovered.
Consider a work like Masterio (2014), oil, acrylic, and pigment print collage on panel at 90 by 80 inches. At that scale, the work operates as both an environment and an object. The collaged pigment prints create pockets of photographic density within an otherwise painterly field. Your eye moves differently across a Kelly than it does across a conventional painting — the surface has its own internal logic, its own pull, its own resistance.
This is something I look for across my collection: artists who have genuinely invented their own visual grammar rather than borrowing from an existing tradition. I see it in Todd Chilton’s masterful play between hard-edge and gestural abstraction — if you haven’t read my appreciation of Todd Chilton’s work, it is well worth your time. I see it in Kelly as well, but arriving from an entirely different direction.
Between Two Worlds
Kelly’s practice sits at an intersection that is historically specific to our moment. The question of what the hand-made means in an age of ubiquitous digital image production is one of the defining tensions of contemporary visual culture. Kelly does not shy away from that tension; he builds his entire practice on top of it.
In this regard, his work rhymes in interesting ways with the photographic investigations of some of the other artists in my collection. Mariah Robertson, for example, uses rigorously analog darkroom processes to create works that resist the digital at every turn — her practice is, in a sense, the mirror image of Kelly’s. You can read more about Robertson’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary photography in my piece on her work. The contrast between Robertson’s pure analog process and Kelly’s digital-into-analog workflow is exactly the kind of productive tension that makes a collection feel alive and in conversation with itself.
The broader question of how artists navigate the digital world is one that art historians and critics have been grappling with seriously for more than two decades. If you are interested in the theoretical underpinnings of collage as an art historical practice — a tradition that runs from Picasso and Braque through Rauschenberg and right up to Kelly’s generation — the Tate Modern’s resource on collage provides an excellent foundation.
Why This Work Matters to Me
I want to be direct about what draws me to collect at this level of engagement. I am not a passive accumulator. I do not acquire art as financial hedging or as a signal of status. I collect because I believe that the encounter between a serious viewer and a serious work of art is one of the most genuinely enriching experiences available to a human being. Michael John Kelly’s work demands serious viewership.
When I stand in front of one of his large panels, I am aware that the image I am seeing is not simply painted — it has been constructed, deconstructed, reconstituted, and then painted over and into. There is a density of decision-making embedded in the surface that rewards long looking. The longer you stay with a Kelly, the more the individual elements begin to resolve: a fragment of photographic imagery here, a smear of oil stick there, a spray-painted arc that cuts across everything. And then, just as you feel you have mapped the surface, the whole thing reasserts itself as a unified image. The parts dissolve back into the whole.
This is not an easy trick to pull off, and Kelly does it consistently across a substantial body of work that has been exhibited internationally — at Gavlak in both Los Angeles and Palm Beach, at 68 Projects in Berlin, at the Torrance Art Museum, at Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami, and at Benrimon Contemporary in New York. The consistency and seriousness of his exhibition history reflects a practice that has been recognized at a high level.
A Final Thought on Building a Collection
I am often asked how I think about the arc of a collection — whether there is a logic to the choices, a narrative that connects Ushio Shinohara to Mariah Robertson to Farrar Hood Cusomato to Michael John Kelly. My honest answer is that the logic is less thematic than temperamental. What connects these artists is a commitment to genuine difficulty: not difficulty for its own sake, but the difficulty that comes from refusing easy answers about what art is supposed to be and do.
Kelly’s work is difficult in exactly that sense. It does not explain itself. It does not meet you halfway. It asks you to bring your full attention and your genuine curiosity, and it rewards both generously. That is, as far as I am concerned, everything you could ask of a work of art.
If you would like to explore Kelly’s work directly, I encourage you to visit the Gavlak Gallery’s dedicated page for the artist, which includes images of his major works and a full exhibition history. And if you want to understand the broader context of a collection like mine — the thinking behind it, the artists that populate it, the way individual works speak to one another — keep reading here. There is a great deal more to share.