Because my dad was a trained cartoonist, I have had access to art books and art materials all my life, but I didn’t begin my formal study of painting until I was in college. Over the years, I have tried several different materials and several different styles of painting, but my initial training was as an abstract expressionist. Although my current work is more representational, it still has an expressionistic feel about it.
The looseness and bold brushwork of my watercolors are a type of expressionism, but my earliest paintings were in oil, and my oil and acrylic paintings have the blockiness that was typical of the expressionistic painting that I first did in college.
Farmhouse in Winter – Jacki Kellum Oil Painting
Morning Has Broken – Jacki Kellum Acrylic Painting
Pink Roses in Blue Delft Vase – Jacki Kellum Oil Painting – Sold
One of my earliest painting teachers identified my painting style as “painterly.” In my oil and acrylic paintings, my brush strokes are indeed painterly. They are painted with the bravura that is characteristic of expressionism.
Rembrandt and Van Gogh were painterly painters, and they are two of my favorite painters.
Blue Neck Scarf – Jacki Kellum Acrylic Painting – April 2021
When I paint faces, I paint more than faces. I paint the subject’s heart, or perhaps I paint my own heart via someone else’s face. In my opinion, heart is the primary concern of painting expressively. Because I want my art to record my first responses to my subject matter, I paint quickly. I write the same way. My paintings are dramatic and emotional. In almost everything that I create, my ambition is to be immediate, honest, and direct. Trying to be a human camera is not at all important to me.
Lilies – Jacki Kellum Acrylic Painting – Sold
Polka-Dotted Teacup – Jacki Kellum Oil Painting – Sold
Winter Thaw – Jacki Kellum Oil Painting – 2022 – Sold
I add the color red to my paintings forcefully and deliberately. In my paintings, red is an unbridled raw energy. When I paint, I sense when and where I need to slash some red across my canvas. For me, red is life.
After years of painting only in watercolor, I began painting in acrylic again in 2021. I began painting in oil again in 2022. I love the way that the oil and acrylic paints allow me to paint more experimentally, without fear of muddying my color.
When I am painting in watercolor, the color itself is most important to me, and my greatest challenge in watercolor is that of preserving clear hues.
Boy with Curls – Jacki Kellum Watercolor – Sold
Red Hibiscus – Jacki Kellum Watercolor
Fiesta – Jacki Kellum Watercolor Painting
I consider myself to be a colorist. Color evokes strong emotions within me, and when I paint in watercolor, I want the color to speak for itself.
Gerberas: Red, White, and Blue – Jacki Kellum Watercolor
In many of my watercolors, my calligraphic lines are reactions to emotions that pass through me. Again, that is a kind of expressionistic bravura.
Janis Joplin – Jacki Kellum Watercolor – Sold
Sunflower with the Blues – Jacki Kellum Watercolor – Sold
Sunflower – Jacki Kellum Watercolor – Sold
Raven – Jacki Kellum Watercolor – Sold
If my subject has little color, I find ways to add splashes of color here and there.
Boy with Curls – Jacki Kellum Drawing in Red Chalk
Most of my drawings are monotone. In my red chalk drawings, I like the way that subtle shades of one color can express a hushed quietness.
Baby Roy – Jacki Kellum Drawing in Red Chalk
Baby Margaret – Jacki Kellum Drawing in Red Chalk
Three Daisies in a Bottle – Jacki Kellum Contour Drawing in Ink
In my contour drawings, I like the stark power of unbroken lines.
Autumn Rose – Jacki Kellum Textile Art
In my textile art, I often draw with satin cords, and my work becomes a hand-sewn contour drawing on fabric.
Night Roses – Jacki Kellum Textile Art
When I was a young child, my grandmother taught me how to embroider.
Garden with the Blues – Jacki Kellum Embroidery
From My Garden – Jacki Kellum Embroidery
Night Garden – Jacki Kellum Embroidery
Night Garden – Jacki Kellum Embroidery Detail
Garden at Blue Bayou – Jacki Kellum Embroider
It is also because of my grandmother that I love gardening. Most of my textile art is a celebration of my grandmother. Each winter, my grandmother would set up her quilting frame in the light that came through her dining room windows, and she would quilt. Her dining room table became her cutting board, and I loved to sit beside my grandmother as she cut up old dresses, shirts, and flour sacks and then arranged them into quilting patterns. Through that process, I learned to love the pictures that had been printed on the fabrics, and my grandmother’s fabrics became the first art gallery that I would have the opportunity to visit.
Map of Jacki Kellum’s Childhood Neighborhood
My grandmother’s house was about a block away from my house. Several times each day, I visited my grandmother. To do so, I would take a shortcut through her vast flower gardens that led to her back door. When I passed through my grandmother’s back door, I entered the sun porch where she washed clothes.
Washerwoman – Jacki Kellum Watercolor Painting
All of her life, my grandmother both washed and rinsed her laundry in galvanized tubs. My grandmother’s wash tubs rested on a small sun porch attached to the back of her house. My grandmother also sewed on that porch, and she made blue calico skirts that she draped around her tubs. Because my grandmother dried her clothes on an outside line, those calico skirts always smelled like rays of raw sunshine and blustering wind on crystal clear days. I loved walking onto my grandmother’s back porch, and when I was a child, I did that often.
To get to my grandmother’s house from mine, I usually cut across an alley between our houses, and afterward, I would walk through my grandmother’s gardens. First, I swished through a forest of tall, swaying hollyhocks and after that, I floated beneath a huge trellis covered with morning glories. When I was about five, a neighbor boy and I got married beneath that blue-mounded altar. My wedding dress was one of my grandfather’s white work shirts, and my veil was a piece of my grandmother’s delicate crochet.
From the morning glories, I meandered along a line that ran between strawberries and masses of flowers. That path connected me to my grandmother’s back door which opened into her sunny porch. As you read the following poem, keep in mind that I grew up in cotton country. I tell everyone that I grew up in the middle of a cotton patch, and that is not far from the truth.
Calico Cotton
I’ve reached the shore
Of my grandmother’s door—
The one from the garden, inside.
Oh, sunny, sweet back room
Of my grandmother’s loom—
The place in the dirt
Of my grandmother’s skirt—
In the lounge of her lap,
Hold me tight, I will nap,
On my grandmother’s porch,
Let me hide.
Although my grandmother did her machine sewing on the back porch, she quilted in her dining room. To pass from the back porch to the dining room, I had to pass the closet where my grandmother dried her flower seeds.
Grandma’s Closet
by Jacki Kellum
The bonnet’s at the very top
The duster’s down below.
Fancy flowers are drying still
They’re hanging in a row.
Breathe the sunshine, weeds, and dirt,
Catch the seeds from Grandma’s skirt,
Save them in your summer shirt.
Plant them–let them grow.
In many ways, I was one of the seeds in my grandmother’s closet.
Often, my grandmother would give me a piece of butcher paper, and she would mix some flour and water to make glue for me. I would cut pictures from her quilting fabric and paste the images onto the paper. I would cut strips of solid fabric to glue around the edges of the picture I had made. Those strips became my frame. Those pasted fabric collages were my first art. I began that when I was about 4, and I began embroidering when I was about 6.
I grew up in the rural South. I would not visit a real gallery until I was over 20. That was the first time that I saw a real painting. Before then, fabric art was the only art that I knew. Although I am currently a painter, my roots lie in my childhood experiences with fabrics. I am happy to be able to revisit that part of my past through my textile art now.
Coiled Fabric Basket with a Rose in Sequins and Tulle – Jacki Kellum Textile Art
Coiled Fabric Basket with a Satin Rose – Jacki Kellum Textile Art
My art, like many other things that I do, is a celebration of the elements that have made me who I am. I collect old things, and in my writing, I take many trips down memory lane. At least once a week, I spent the night at my grandmother’s house, and I slept on her feather bed.
Ode to Grandma’s Feather Bed
by Jacki Kellum
Like Great Aunt Edith’s too-long grip-
Too soft, too close, too tight,
You took me on a feather trip,
That lasted through the night.
Rollercoaster up and down,
Hot and sweaty through the down,
Carried me to slumber town,
And rocked me there,
Til dawn.
In many ways, my art is a way I traverse the often rocky path that my life takes me, and I suppose that is why I continue to create.