Meet Jada Kellison
Jada Kellison
Jada Kellison is a North Carolina-based artist whose passion for painting has always been driven by her love for design. Her career as an interior designer works in tandem with her work as an abstract oil painter. Jada is keenly interested in how the placement of color and form create mood and she works to bring joy, balance, color harmony, and a bit of vague mystery into each painting. With precise attention on the complexities of composition, Jada's paintings are designed like rooms for a great party; at once they offer the viewer the depth to settle into intricately formed spaces for conversations that are both breezy and casual and also aim to stir up a colorful, high energy vibration.
Jada resides in Morehead City, North Carolina with her husband and daughter where she works from her downtown studio.
Artist Statement
"I begin my process by selecting a specific color and then use it as an anchor to identify other colors. As an interior designer, I work fluently between the two languages of interior design and painting on canvas. My mood has to be joyful and happy when I paint because I think of the final painting as being connected to that mood. If it isn’t, I leave the canvas and return later to work on it. As inspiration for my palette, I like to look online at fashion and at various patterns and designs, and often tear pages out of magazines. Once I feel the colors are mostly planned, I create an underpainting of words and phrases that often feel very random to me, but which usually stem from thoughts about specific people I know and love. Some of this underpainting is often left uncovered in the final painting. I try to avoid any type of subject in my work and, if I see any forming, try to correct it. Equally important to me as the role color plays in the mood, is the idea of leaving open space in the composition. For me it provides a sense of order and a type of breathing space. Forms are installed and arranged on the canvas, much like how I might plan and design an interior space. Working on a large canvas both helps me to see and feel that sense of space in my painting and to create a hierarchy of colorful shapes and textures that are intentionally placed together and ultimately balanced."
- Jada
