Kelly is an award winning wildlife and botanical artist who lives on a Connecticut farm surrounded by her beloved New England woodlands. She is inspired by all things in nature and considers herself a contemporary natural history artist; interpreting her experiences and observations in the field into her paintings and drawings. Traveling to far away wild places sparks her inspiration but she is just as likely to find subjects closer to home; during walks in the woods, birding trips to the shoreline, and sitting in her own gardens. Kelly paints predominantly in watercolor on calfskin vellum and paper, but has recently begun working in casein on both paper and panel, and in silverpoint/metalpoint on paper.
Kelly is a Signature Member of the Society of Animal Artists (SAA) and has had work in SAA’s Art & the Animal exhibition in both 2013 & 2014 after jurying in as a Signature member in 2012. Her exhibitions include: Art of the Animal Kingdom, Bennington, VT; Focus on Nature XIII, Albany, NY 2014, receiving a juror’s award; Focus on Nature XIV, Roger Tory Peterson Institute, Jamestown, NY 2016, receiving a juror’s award; and Birds in Art at Woodson Museum, Wausau, WI 2010, where her work was chosen for the traveling show. She has been an exhibitor at the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition in Charleston, SC from 2011-2015 and the Waterfowl Festival in Easton, MD from 2014-2018. Kelly is a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists (ASBA), the New England Society of Botanical Artists, and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Florilegium Society. She has shown in numerous international juried exhibitions, including The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, the Horticultural Society of New York, the New York Botanical Gardens and the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society’s Botanical Images Scotia in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she was awarded a Silver Gilt medal for her body of work. Kelly has had the opportunity to show several times at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew Gardens in London; the exhibits included the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Florilegium Society, ‘Botanicals, Environmental Expressions in Art–The Alisa and Isaac M. Sutton Collection’ and the ASBA exhibit Losing Paradise, Endangered Plants Here and Around the World which also exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History. Kelly is a member of the Florilegium Society of the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kauai, Hawaii where she works for two weeks every year with the Florilegium and has begun documenting the native birds and plants of Kauai for future work.