About the Artist

An brief artist’s bio seems in order, to add a bit more detail to my blurb on the home page:

I have spent many years absorbing the experiences and knowledge that I now attempt to express through my art. The earliest years were as a dreamy, artistic, bookish, loner child in the wetlands, forests, and flyways of northern Wisconsin. The second phase was exploring the world through jobs and travel: as a psychiatric technician, truck stop nightshift waitress, migrant farm laborer, woods worker for the Alaska Forest Service, fieldworker for researchers studying eagles, bears, whales and blueberries, veterinary surgical technician, doing soil mapping, train-hopping, cycling and hitch-hiking on this continent and others, culminating along the way in a B.S. degree in Animal&Veterinary Science. Science was filling in the gaps in my mystical experience of the natural world, adding layers of understanding, grounding my poetic sensibility. A sharp left turn led to teaching art (I also taught biology, earth sciences, history, and culture), an undergraduate degree in art (printmaking), Masters and MFA (sculpture), and the raising of a family, along with a small garlic farm in Unity Maine, my home. Art had claimed me, in the end, full circle completed.

I now make primarily three kinds of artwork. My acrylic collage-based paintings express either the mystical energy of the natural world as I first knew it in childhood, or riff improvisationally off prints from the grand age of natural history exploration, when biodiversity was new and each lifeform had grandeur, gravitas, and mystery. My watercolor/gouache paintings explore a range from landscape to abstraction, using overlapping patterns and symbolizing the intricate relationships in nature, both visible and invisible, with a broader palette of color. I also maintain a drawing practice, simply because I love drawing.

Kelly Bennett Desrosiers

Popham Beach, Christmas Day, 2019