Cda Artist Hits High Note

When the Ambassador Gallery’s doors opened Thursday evening in New York City, the nation’s trendiest people studied Eric Clapton, as painted by Coeur d’Alene’s Kelly Sullivan.

Her paintings are sharing walls with artwork by the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood, the Who’s John Entwistle and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia.

Kelly, who owns Tubs Cafe with her husband, Tom, is the only woman and nonmusician to contribute work to the 18-day exhibit at the Soho gallery.

“I like her style. It’s not stark photo-realism,” says Maggi Hausman, gallery director. “Her work is very expressionist. It has an appeal to it.”

On exhibit are Kelly’s paintings of five musicians: Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King, blues musician Jimmy Rogers and Dave Matthews and his band.

Kelly sent a photo of her Dave Matthews painting to the band’s manager, hoping the musicians would sign her work. But the manager told her he didn’t like it and neither did the band.

“I love the Dave Matthews piece,” Kelly says, studying her interpretation of the band’s record-label photo. “That was the biggest bubble-buster of my career. I tweak people. That’s my style.”

Kelly is as animated off canvas as on. She knows what she wants and how to get it. She has told gloomy Tubs customers to have a good time or leave. She has peddled her paintings in New York like a door-to-door salesman.

“I like the business as much as the art,” Kelly says. “I like putting the deal together.”

Her grandmother painted. For two weeks every summer, she surrounded Kelly with every artistic material she could find.

“Her big saying was, `Don’t be shy with the paint,”’ Kelly says.

Grandma painted landscapes. Kelly liked people.

“There’s something amazing about faces,” she says. “I remember drawing Jim Morrison, David Bowie. I wanted to do a musician collection.”

Kelly found her art mecca in San Francisco in 1989, tending bar and painting. Two years later, she made her first big sale. A chiropractor paid $1,200 for her painting of Olympic runner Carl Lewis in midstride, leg muscles tensed.

Trips to Thailand, Bali and Europe provided plenty of people for Kelly’s canvases. Annual weeklong art fairs she organized in San Francisco exposed her skill to the public.

Kelly won particular attention with her finger smears. She sketched a picture on a canvas and painted enough to hint at the finished picture. Then she invited people to dip their fingers in her paint and add some smears to the picture. Participants signed their names along the border.

Members of the Rolling Stones added their smears to Kelly’s painting of them during their Voodoo Lounge tour in 1994.

Kelly was scheduled to bartend at a party the Rolling Stones were attending, but she painted instead. She keeps the canvas rolled in her studio.

“Keith Richards was great, fun, silly,” she says. “He wiped the paint off my face.”

The finger smears also were a hit with corporations, as well as at benefits and celebrations.

Between those and periodic sales of her paintings, Kelly survived. But then the studio she rented was put on the market and her annual art fair lost its sponsor.

Kelly moved, fell in love, married Tom and settled in Coeur d’Alene in 1996. Her art slipped to the back burner as she helped manage Tubs Cafe and had a daughter, Aidan, then a son, Liam. Just before Liam’s birth six months ago, she knew she had to find time for her art.

“I’m 36 and having my first gallery show,” she says, disgusted at her “advanced” age. “I think if I want to do it, I have to do it now.”

Kelly collected her works - B.B. King in rapture while he sings, his eyes squeezed shut, his mouth open, his cheeks round as mushroom tops; Jimmy Rogers clutching his guitar and looking up with a joyful gleam in his eyes; and the Dave Matthews Band, grim as bodyguards - and took off for New York.

Maggi at the Ambassador figured Kelly’s work would fit in well in a rock ‘n’ roll exhibit the gallery was planning for summer. She encouraged Kelly to finish paintings of Clapton and Springsteen for the show.

Kelly is one of nine artists featured. Her 4-foot-by-4-foot and 4-foot-by-5-foot canvases hang with paintings by Marty Balin of Jefferson Starship, Tico Torres of Bon Jovi, Peter Lewis of Moby Grape and David Getz of Big Brother & the Holding Co.

It’s almost a dream come true.

“I’ve always wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll star. I just can’t sing,” Kelly says. “When I paint, I sing loudly. When I’m rich, I’ll have a soundproof studio.”

Cynthia Taggart can be reached at (208) 765-7128 or by e-mail at cynthiat@spokesman.com.