Artist Jason Kelly with a favourite piece taking the pith out of the food dish fish and chips. Photo / Rachel Canning
Artist Jason Kelly with a favourite piece taking the pith out of the food dish fish and chips. Photo / Rachel Canning
The artist who's an Ironman.
Three interesting facts about Jason Kelly: He moved to Taupō two years ago, he is in training for his sixth Ironman, and he creates Kiwiana-style artwork that contains laugh-out-loud text.
His artistic commentary is full of irony about the Kiwi way of life. He sometimes makes up a fictional company and then uses 'word art' that makes you think. For example, maybe this summer you would like to enjoy Pith orange juice? Because in New Zealand, we love to take the pith!
Kelly says his art is word art, often sculptural, as he paints onto wood, and generally takes the pith. Dick Frizzell's pop art style was an early influence, and the two are friendly.
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You may remember a retro-themed stamp issue Kiwi Kitchen issued by New Zealand Post in 2015. Each stamp was painted onto a wooden board and then injected with Jason's humorous word art. The collection contains the likes of mousetraps, fairy bread and onion dip.
He says the point of his art is to push the envelope and his commentary is often comic, even when it is about a serious topic such as the current pandemic.
He laughs about a T-shirt he saw a woman wearing while he was at the first week of the anti-vaccine/mandate protests in Wellington.
"The T-shirt read 'This is not the man date I wanted', and when you see a good-looking chick walking around with that tee, you get it.
"I have been surprised how quiet people were through Covid. We haven't seen artists question things through their work. I would have thought by now musos would have written songs about vaccinated people and unvaccinated people," Kelly says.
In 2012 he was living in Christchurch, and one morning he got up at 4am and spray-painted a wall on a collapsed building in Sumner. The artwork read, "Build it on Jelly, by order Jelly City Council, Christchurch, NZ." The jelly is a reference to how people described how the ground and building felt during an earthquake.
"It was humour when people were hurting and people loved it. It was up for ages and ages until it faded."
Jason spray painted this street artwork onto a collapsed building in Sumner after the Christchurch earthquakes. Photo / Supplied
His work was recently exhibited at Taupō Museum and Art Gallery in an exhibition titled Second Helpings, and exhibitions officer Kerence Stephen reported that kids were completely captivated by some of his pieces.
"They would just stand in front of the art and really absorb it, they got it," Stephen says.
A recent commission has been artwork for a new memory game called New Zealand In A Box, with Kelly creating images for the cards. Other commissions come from advertising companies who ask Jason to sketch or draw pieces for their client. At the moment he is making a present for a wife who is ill, from her husband.
Kelly's artwork is available to buy on his Instagram shop @JasonKellyArtist and at www.fishmob.co.nz. He is hoping to find a part-time job, or else a Monday to Friday job between now and March next year, when he is "going to have a crack" at his sixth Ironman event.
"The problem with commercial retail art is that it becomes a fad and then the market becomes flooded. Art is sort of like interior design now, it changes."
His dad got him into triathlons in 1991, and after a 12-year break, it was his dad who encouraged him to enter the March 2023 Ironman. Kelly has completed Ironman Taupō four times and also completed an Ironman event in Australia.
