Felix Kelly
A look back at the storied career of New Zealand expatriate, illustrator, graphic designer and artist Felix Kelly (1914–94).
Image credit: Felix Kelly, The Three Sisters, 1943, oil on paper, 21 x 25.5cm, on loan from the University of Auckland Art Collection. Courtesy Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
Felix Runcie Kelly, ‘Fix’ to his friends, was born in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1914. He would go on to become a highly successful graphic designer, artist, illustrator and celebrity interior designer in the United Kingdom. The son of a well-off engineer, he was particularly close to his mother, much younger than her husband. Although he was enrolled at Auckland’s elite King’s College, he was mostly home-schooled by his possessive mother.
Kelly trained as a graphic designer, dabbling in cartooning on the side. When his father went bankrupt in 1933, Kelly’s mother left, decamping to London. Kelly followed her two years later, never to return to New Zealand. His obvious talent soon found him employment as a commercial artist with Lintas, the advertising wing of the corporate giant Unilever. When World War II broke out he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, no doubt attracted by the sashing uniform and glamour, but when his health began to fail he was forced from active service.
This did, however, allow Kelly to focus on his painting. Influenced by the metaphysical Surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà and Paul Delvaux, he quickly adopted the neo-romantic style then fashionable in England, filling his canvases with quirky and eccentric signifiers of Englishness later familiar from 1960s British TV shows like The Prisoner and The Avengers: steamships and steam trains, stripey deckchairs and hot air balloons in moody, otherwise-empty landscapes. This delicate, meticulous, unabashed camp found immediate appeal with Kelly’s well-heeled clientele, particularly those who... Subscribe to read all articles in full
