Bob Kelly is one of the most exciting emerging artists in the Atlanta art community this year. His smooth, sophisticated style captures the hidden spirit of deeply felt emotion with subtlety and sensitivity. His love of nature has given him the ability to sense the inner beauty of things, the things that are often confined by words but are able to be expressed in form and gesture. When asked what his art means, he defers to the form and lets it speak for itself. His latest work evokes a spectrum of emotions - inner struggle, quiet contemplation, expectation and peace.

A native of the New York area, Bob spent most of his career in the graphic design world as a principal in his own successful business for many years. Bob’s formal training at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art gave him a solid foundation in shape, space, scale, texture and color – all of which allowed him to create numerous highly acclaimed marketing and advertising campaigns. Bob’s clients included many Fortune 500 companies, including local companies like Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, SunTrust Bank, AGCO and many others.

Several years ago Bob was able to return to his first love, the world of fine art. Because of his love of nature and his finely tuned sense of color, Bob initially released his creative energies in the area of oil painting, both landscapes and abstract forms. While he was deepening his understanding of these mediums, he felt he needed the freedom to take his dream to the next level and move to three- dimensional work. Bob realized that he was actually returning to something that he loved as a young man in art school – sculpture. Now was his chance to use everything he had learned in the graphic design world to express his understanding of human form with both excitement and sensitivity. He has studied with one of the most successful sculptors in the southeast, Marty Dawe of CherryLion Studios, for the past four years.

Bob has also studied with Internationally acclaimed Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson, Kay Hurley, a nationally known pastel and oil landscape artist in Cincinnati, Marc Chatov, a nationally known portrait artist in the Atlanta area, and most recently, the nationally acclaimed portrait sculptor, Philppe Faraut. Bob currently lives in Atlanta with his wife, Mary Kay and their golden retriever, Jackson.