Voices from the city

A Painter’s Life

According to Phil Kelly, it’s “absurd that all the swimming pools in the world are blue.” Tacked to the wall of his Colonia Cuauhtémoc studio is a design scheme to remedy that: nudes in yellow and black.

Kelly paints oil canvasses with his hands and wipes them off on a wall in the back hallway. Piles of newspapers and magazines, jugs of turpentine and linseed oil, and a table covered in Victoria bottle caps, paint tubes and cardboard boxes stuffed with photos and clippings spill over the room. His CD collection is a heap of discs and cases.

The walls are papered with his work. A shower curtain hangs over the window that looks out to Circuito Interior. The chaos is so artful, such a beautiful mess, that when he says, “I really should tidy the place up sometime,” and then pops open a Victoria, you can’t believe that he ever would.

Born in Ireland and raised in England, Kelly first came to Mexico in 1982. He lived above a “knicker shop” and taught English at a company located on the road to Toluca. He would wake up at 5 a.m to cross the city on the bus, edge along the side of the carretera, and arrive by 7. His city scenes radiate the hecticness of the ordinary: jumbled buildings, blurred crowds, streaming traffic, decaying footbridges.

“You make a select poetry out of the everyday,” he says.

Kelly cooks (the day after this interview he was going to make roast beef for Nick McCarthy, the bass player for the group Franz Ferdinand), listens to jazz, works in the studio seven days a week and likes it when other people smoke – even though he himself does not. He is married to Ruth Munguia and has two daughters. He became a Mexican citizen in 1999.

Why did you come to Mexico?

I tossed a coin … I thought if I came here I could either walk north or south and if I didn’t find anything on the way I could jump off at the end. I came here and I had, like, $50 and I spent half of it on a night in the hotel looking through the yellow pages for English schools, and then like the third one that I came across, they said ‘well, we might have some work and we have somebody that wants to share an apartment.’

What do you think distinguishes the urbanscape of Mexico City from other cities?

It’s sort of vibrancy. I spend hours out on that balcony, watching… there always seem to be one element, or little element that makes you startled. I think Mexico City is its startlingness. It’s a bit like the similar thing that Henry Miller had with Paris, accidents and incidents of everyday life.

I used to read books and books and books and books, and then I came to Mexico and I almost stopped reading because you read the streets. You don’t actually have to get books. So most of the paintings are about reading the streets.

Do you think that living in Mexico suits a person who’s against rules in general?

I think in Mexico here we’re in favor of inventiveness rather than rules. The whole thing is a bit like improvisation, and that’s what’s so wonderful about jazz, you know? It’s based on the improvisation.

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Author: Catherine Dunn

Author Bio: Catherine Dunn is a freelance writer and a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lived in Mexico City for five years.

Image Credit: Luz Montero

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