WOODSTOCK, New York — When I arrived at Keltie Ferris’s studio last month, he first asked me to see the home he shares with his wife and their child. “It’s important to situate yourself,” he says, offering a look at the domestic side of his life before turning to the work. We then walked back across the field toward the studio, where a loud scratching sound drew his attention. Ferris pointed to a massive black bear climbing over the fence and out of his abundant vegetable garden. It was a dramatic, though not unusual, Catskills sighting, and it sent my adrenaline surging while reminding us that we were not alone. Ferris said reassuringly that they are gentle, shy creatures as the bear vanished into the woods.
Ferris’s abstract paintings are built around such contradictions. They show us how to undo binaries by containing both poles at once, literally and metaphorically: alone and together, presence and absence, hard and soft, opaque and transparent. Many of the paintings combine several approaches — spray gun mists, direct brushwork, palette knife-carved hard edges, looping paint drawings, and erasures made with turpentine-soaked rags. At once all-over paintings and gridlike, orderly structures, they feel both urban and rural, digital and analog, historic and unmistakably of the present.
Alongside the paintings, Ferris makes prints by coating his clothed body in oil, pressing it against paper, and then adding dry pigment that adheres to the printed surface. He began these works in the 2010s after being inspired by Jasper Johns’s body prints. As indexical records of presence, they have since subtly documented Ferris’s gender transition.
During the pandemic, I was struck by Ferris’s 2021 exhibition at Mitchell-Innes and Nash in New York, which featured a monumental site-specific wall drawing layered beneath canvases. Graphite drawings on canvas appeared in multicolored artist frames, blurring the line between drawing and painting, and between intense color and black and white. The show became a singular, magnanimous gesture, opening a view into the intimacy of his practice through intuitive, direct pencil marks on a large scale. Staged in the pandemic, when masks and social distancing were still part of daily life, it asserted the artist’s presence.
Keltie Ferris was born in 1977 in Louisville, Kentucky. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in 2004, and his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. After splitting his time for several years between New York City and the Catskills, he now lives and works full-time in Woodstock, New York. In 2018, he was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Speed Museum of Art in Louisville, Kentucky.
Hyperallergic: You grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Can you tell me about your exposure to art and artmaking during your childhood?
Keltie Ferris: There was not a ton of art to look at. There is the Speed Museum in Louisville, but mostly we just looked at books. I drew absentmindedly, but it wasn’t a serious thing. My brother and sister are both musicians, which I’ve realized over time has been a big influence.
When I was in middle school, my mother began to teach herself to paint. She became a landscape painter and showed her work in local venues. She would find communities of people who shared her interests in California Impressionism and the Canadian Group of Seven. She used “how-to” books, which were very prescriptive, and she would show us the work at dinner so we could critique it. She would ask us questions like whether the horizon line could be positioned at 60% from the bottom edge. There was an idea of formulas to unlock, to get the perfect painting. We would discuss these things. Sometimes we would watch art-making videos together, and I remember thinking, “I could never do this. This is so hard.”
