Bay Kelley, a local artist, has been painting a portrait every week for the past 38 weeks. He intends to paint a total of 52, one for every week of the year. The catch: he never knows who he is going to paint next.
Titled "52 Paintings for 52 Strangers," Kelley's project does just what the title suggests. Each week, he tries to find the people around him doing good deeds and approach them with a compliment. He then requests an interview.
"I get refused often," said Kelley. "But, while it sounds like a con, I promise that it's not."
For those strangers who take Kelley up on the offer, they sit for a one-hour interview, then Kelley takes that information and works for a week to complete a portrait of the individual.
Kelley first envisioned this project to combat something that most people can identify with.
"I felt that my worldview was being informed by media," Kelley said. "I felt powerless and got clouded with pessimism."
He talked about how listening to the constant narrative coming from TV, and the internet makes it difficult to see a person as an individual.
Kelley's answer was to "start training his eye to positivity" — a phrase that he mentioned multiple times, and when asked to extrapolate on it he added that it means "going out and finding people doing good."
For this project though, Kelley couldn't just settle for finding people doing good, he wanted to listen to their stories and capture them within a 6x6 inch frame.
"It's about getting to know individuals instead of just knowing people generally," he said.
Kelley also fully admits that this has been a journey of inward inspection as well as outward.
"I know that I harbor true prejudices, but the more I interact with people, the more I can shave those prejudices away," he said.
Another interesting element of this project is that the subjects — the strangers — do not get to see their portrait until the final reveal after all 52 are done.
In mid-September, Kelley will be holding a gallery at the Jane Dempsey Art Center in Auburn to show off all of the completed paintings.
"The true test is going to be when I hand the portrait back," Kelley said.
A lot of the paintings are a combination of realistic and abstract portraits while some are completely abstract.
"It used to start as a portrait, and then I would abstract it," Kelley said. "Now, it's usually an abstraction, and then if the painting wants to be a portrait, then I pull it to a portrait."
Since this project is, at its core, rooted in the community that Kelley finds himself in, he said that he hopes his paintings can be a way to foster empathy.
Kelley said he hopes that Auburn students specifically can learn to "think through their perceptions of people," and by talking to strangers like this, people can get "a personal connection to real issues."
The biggest take away from this project for Kelley so far has not been some kind of artistic style or brush stroke. For him, the lasting message of this year-long endeavor is a realization: "There's a (ton) of good people around here."
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