Kelly Lucarelli
Fort Mill, SC
Artist, Gallery Owner, Art Educator, Graphic Designer - A creative journey woman!
Message
Originally from Lafayette, Indiana, I was sparked with a love for art in middle and high school due to my inspiring art educators. Earning my BFA in Graphic Design at Ball State University, I spent 15 years working as a graphic designer, ultimately running my own freelance design business in Charlotte, NC and Fort Mill, SC for 10 of those years. I collaborated with a variety of writers, marketing managers, companies, designers, and artists to create competitive designs, marketing collateral and campaigns.
In 2015, my aspirations shifted to becoming an art educator, hoping to inspire students the way my teachers had inspired me. I earned my MAT in K-12 Art Education from Winthrop University in 2017 and became an art educator at Fort Mill High School for six years. Courses I taught included Drawing 1, Drawing 2, 3-D Design & Sculpture, Portfolio Art Honors, and AP Art & Design. I enjoyed working with teenagers and sponsored the National Art Honor Society chapter at our school, encouraging students to use their creative abilities to make community impacts through a variety of creative projects.
In September 2023, I followed a life-long dream to open a local art gallery in our community of Fort Mill, SC, where local artists can showcase their works, community members can take art workshops, and I can work full-time as an artist. This is a new and exciting venture that I am exploring as I continue to find ways to infuse art into our community.
I have two wonderful children and a supportive husband who have been amazingly supportive throughout this creative journey. I am forever grateful to them as well as my friends and family.
Statement
Nature is where I go to disconnect - or reconnect?...
to heal,
to quiet the chaos,
to become inspired,
to see clearly,
to channel sense of adventure,
to rest,
to smile,
to explore.
My recent work explores these places and their essences that create this disconnection for me... or reconnection, really. The power of the rock structures, contrasting of natural textures, water movement, and reflective light, all of which aid in the unwinding, are significantly influencing my compositions and strokes as I aim to share these intimate moments with the viewer, leaving them with their own similar experience. My processes continue to shift between impressionistic, detailed works which focus on color and light and abstract expressive works which convey emotion through repetition, line, textures, and color theory from a looser perspective. At times, I cross over those boundaries, deconstructing the natural world with abstract elements to showcase a contrast of power, serenity, or perspective.