When one enters the home of artists Jeff Kellar and Judy LaBrasca, the pair are unequivocally warm, welcoming, open, and gracious hosts. Full stop. However, a visitor (particularly one who brings along a notepad and recorder) may get the underlying feeling that the two do not exactly love having their space, or their time, disrupted.
And why would they?
Theirs is a world of their own making, both literally and figuratively. The house brims with art objects they’ve created—furniture, paintings, sculptures. “Everything in here, we made,” says Jeff, “and a lot of it we designed together.” Each have in-home studios, or rather, more accurately, the home is their studio. For decades, they’ve fashioned a life deeply rooted in art and “making things,” as they both say often. “It’s what we do,” says Jeff, “even if they’re not sold, we’re still going to get ideas and try to figure out a way to make them.”
Jeff paints and sculpts, and Judy works mostly in photography. In conversation, they speak almost always of the other’s work, rarely their own. Not only are they each other’s partners, they’re advocates for one another, champions, admirers, fans in a way that is refreshing in an art world that can be rife with egos, competition, and actors of suspect motivation. Together they have made a space that is beautiful and uniquely theirs. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine wanting company!
The house is a 1921 bungalow turned arts and crafts style by Jeff and Judy shortly after moving in in 1989. (Before that, they’d run a small studio and gallery on Exchange Street since 1975.) The transformation included ground floor studios for them both, an expanded basement for Jeff’s woodworking equipment, as well as upstairs bedrooms. “We were the architects,” Jeff says. “We’re starving artists, so we try to do as much as we can ourselves.”
“Jeff did all the inside finishing,” Judy adds, “all the woodwork, the flooring, he put all that in.”
The results are astonishing, and clearly well lived in.
Judy spends most of her time in her studio off the main entrance, separated from the foyer by a set of gorgeous French doors (made by Jeff). The studio is cozy, with all manner of pencils, brushes, and other materials at arms-length. “It’s like a galley kitchen,” she says. “I like to move between things, and if I need a book, I can reach it. If I need a tool, I can reach it.” In addition to making things, Judy is also a beloved teacher at MECA as well as a Montessori school in Falmouth. She delights in sharing some of the “exquisite corpse” drawings done by her students. (Exquisite corpse drawings are three-paneled works passed between multiple artists. Each completes a panel without seeing the other contributions until the end, when all are revealed. The method comes from the French surrealists, who originally used the same technique with words to discover unexpected sentences.)
Jeff’s studio is two-tiered. The upstairs portion functions like a gallery space he uses to finish and photograph pieces, and also to “use my computer like a sketchbook,” he says. Downstairs is where he paints—though he uses the word “assembles”—his work. “I’ve been convinced to call myself a painter for various reasons, but I still feel more like a sculptor because the pieces really are assembled,” he says. This assembly involves applying layers of clay resin and pigment to 1/8” aluminum, then burnishing and sanding for the desired effect.
It’s obvious from Jeff’s work that he is very attuned to space. “All of it alludes to architecture,” Judy says, and she’s dead on. His paintings, which he sometimes calls illusions, heavily involve the viewer and give the impression that one is interacting not with a flat surface, but with 3D space. A viewer feels they are facing into, and around, corners, or gazing at the distinct Y-shape where two walls meet a ceiling. “The point of looking at something like this,” Jeff says, referencing a piece that looks like a folded black screen, “is to feel your feet on the ground.” Of another piece in deep indigo: “This one has three lines made from the application of the clay, but it takes a certain light to notice. I like the way light picks things out, either architecturally or in nature.”
Jeff’s sculptures, too, are concerned with the pliability of space. For a series entitled 43 Places in 43 Days that showed at the Portland Museum of Art, he created multiple wooden boxes, each containing various arrangements of rooms, walls, ledges, and staircases. Looking inside of them—each piece accommodates a single viewer at a time, “so for that moment, it’s yours,” says Jeff—one feels a tremendous sense of reverberating scale. Is this space enormous or tiny? Have I shrunken down or expanded? “The throughline with Jeff’s work,” Judy says, “is space with light in it.” In fact, a friend once noted to Jeff, “There are no people in your work,” and Jeff responded, “You’re the people in it.”
It’s easy to see the fluidity between the art and the home that produced it, which is also filled with light and space. But if you don’t happen to be lucky enough to get an invite, aren’t able to feel for yourself that gentle buzzing energy of so much creation, if Jeff and Judy are consumed, as they often are, by making things, your next best bet might be a trip to the Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells, where Jeff shows. It’ll give you a pretty good idea.▪️
