An Easel Among The Flesh Pots

Joan Marie Kelly, an American painter who lives and teaches in Singapore, opens a show of paintings Thursday night at New York’s Blue Mountain Gallery that defy expectations. She works strictly from the motif in a realist idiom, but she is drawn to socially and economically complex intersections of humanity that range from monastic communities to the red light districts of various Asian cities. The cover painting, depicting a scene in Singapore’s Little India, is titled “Zone of Contact.” For Ms. Kelly, the act of painting is a means to break down barriers, allowing a Western woman rare access in a painting such as this one to this daily lives and longings of sex workers and the men who surround them, whether migrant worker customers from Bangladesh or operators, who include a Chinese "uncle". There is a heroic, almost renaissance composition at play, and yet the types represented were actual individuals who assumed their poses and played their role within the narrative. Traditional technique meets the world’s oldest profession to generate imagery of genuine freshness.