ABOUT THE ARTIST, ANDREW 'GRASSI' KELAHER

Born 1973

First brush with art

I vaguely remember the first time I thought anything to do with art was cool. I was probably 6 or 7 years old and I was watching Rolf Harris painting on a children’s show with a large brush, I thought it was amazing and wanted to paint like Rolf.

First exhibited

The Sydney Royal Easter Show had an art exhibition and way back when I was a kid it was considered a pretty big deal. So my parents entered one of my paintings in it. My mum can’t remember exactly how old I was, she thinks I was about 9 or 10 years old when the painting got exhibited. It looked like a bad Pro Hart painting with a little house and some gum trees but I thought it was pretty good. For a couple of years following I was exhibited at the Easter Show.

Boats

At about 13 or 14 years of age I became obsessed with sailing boats. I still painted but not very regularly. I spent every possible moment either sailing or in the old mans garage building boats with resin, fibre glass and carbon fibre. I managed to design and build a couple of State and National Title winning boats although usually they won with someone else sailing them!

Giving up painting

After high school I went to Uni and got myself a Science Degree. Don’t tell anyone though, it would be bad for my rep, but yep I’m a bit of a science nerd. Between studying, racing and building sail boats the painting and dreams of being an artist disappeared.

Ski Bumming

After finishing Uni, I got an office job and quickly realised I hated it. Driving into the city in traffic each day to sit in front of a computer was not for me. So in less than a year I quit and took off, with a mate, to work in the snow for a season. We became lift operators (lifties) at Perisher Blue and for the first three seasons it’s hard to remember much.

Snow Sculptures

When you’re a Lifty there’s plenty of time to slack off and do nothing.  It gets boring, so to fill in time I would entertain myself building snow sculptures next to the lift I was working. This quickly expanded and escalated into a full time gig and I became a professional snow sculptor.

Return to painting

It’s a funny thing when you get badly hurt, it can change the way you look at things and in my case it reminded me how much I enjoyed painting. I had a bit of an incident involving some crowd surfing at a rock concert, a metal hand rail, my back and some enthusiastic security guards. Anyway after I got out of hospital I was a bit immobile so I found my old paints and started painting again. Somehow I had become better at painting and could paint whatever I wanted.

Lucky Break

After recovering I took off to Canada to chase after a girl (now my wife). We spent the winter over there just snowboarding and skiing almost every day. My Mum rang me out of the blue one evening and asked me how much I wanted for some of the paintings I did while recovering. I didn’t care but she ended up selling them to a lady who had only seen photos of them. That was great, it paid for us to fly down to America and go to Disneyland.

Another Lucky Break

Back in Australia and dirt poor, I decided to give the dream of becoming a professional artist a bit of a crack. I took some paintings, walked in off the street to the Trevor Victor Harvey Gallery (TVH) in Sydney and showed them. Now normally they would have told me to go away and come back with an appointment and some professionalism but luckily for me Trevor, the gallery's owner, spotted something he liked about my paintings. They also needed a labourer to help move a large travelling exhibition they were running and I needed a job. So they showed my paintings and gave me a job.

Trevor’s initial reaction to my paintings turned out to be correct and the TVH Gallery quickly sold every painting I had. So they sacked me as a labourer and told me to go away and paint. Hey presto I became a professional artist while still in my early twenties.

Inspiration/ Influences

At the moment I am probably most influenced by a large list of Australian artists. Various aspects from John Glover, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley, Jeffrey Smart, William Robinson, Jason Benjamin, John Olsen, Tim Storrier, Margaret Woodward, John Earle and of course Rolf Harris currently capture my interest and inspire me to paint. I mainly focus on painting Australian landscapes - from spacious country fields to perfect surfing beaches and everything in between.

While my current style tends to focus on landscapes in a cross between surreal, naïve and realism, I do keep a keen eye on developments in modern art across the globe and the likes of Jeff Koons, Chris Ofili and Damien Hirst all spike my interest. I have produced some abstract artworks using carbon fibre, Kevlar and metallic automotive paint inspired by these artists and I built a Damien Hirst inspired snow sculpture at Thredbo in 2008 so I do depart occasionally from landscapes.

That’s the beauty of art in this current time I can do whatever I’m influenced by at that particular moment and whatever I find pleasing. I like to think that all the art styles and techniques from the last few hundred years are like tools in a great big shed that I can choose to pull down and use in any way I want.

View Grassi’s Portfolio