Despite regularly embracing the opportunity to combine painting and travel, Cecil Kelly often also set up easel in his own Ōtautahi Christchurch neighbourhood and encouraged his Canterbury College School of Art students to do the same. In this instance, he was planted opposite the Clarendon Hotel and Public Trust Office on Oxford Terrace, five minutes from where he taught at the School of Art, and the same short distance from his home and studio downriver at 245 Montreal Street, where he lived with his wife, painter Elizabeth Kelly.Kelly embedded painting outdoors into his teaching. Bill Sutton, who trained under Kelly in the 1930s, later recalled him requiring students to paint over a previous week’s efforts (successful or otherwise) in a second sitting from the same position as an exercise in seeing differences in light and shadow.

(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)