Keltie Ferris Louisville, Kentucky, born 1977

Keltie Ferris’s compositions channel the catalytic potential of medium and physical technique into expressions of physicality, energy, and change. His works thrum with vibrant color and a diverse deployment of pictorial forms and textures. Hand-painted pattern fields, bursts of spray paint and oil pastel, raised outlines, and pixelated backgrounds nod to a wide range of visual lineages, including natural motifs, ancient craftwork, Abstract Expressionism, contemporary digital images. In his large-scale paintings, thick areas of medium are built up, then alternately swiped, blurred, and removed with a variety of tools. By deconstructing his own process of painting into its most fundamental actions and materials, Ferris offers an expansive vision of abstraction as a site of formal experimentation and conceptual ingenuity.

This keen articulation of materiality is further evinced by an ongoing series of body prints, which transform painting into a personal index. Using natural oils and pigments, Ferris wields his own body as a brush and imprints its form onto the canvas or paper surface. The artist thus becomes both process and material, action and image—a presence conveyed through each imprinted mark, reifying the relationship between Ferris’s self and the work of art.