A true landscape painting does not tell us precisely what a certain landscape looks like—or, at least, not only that. What it tells us, if this does not sound extravagant, is what a landscape means, what is its individual power and beauty. The painter sees what is before him, takes it into himself, understands and loves it, and then re-creates for us the double reality of what he sees and what he feels. Cezanne, to whom William Kelley is spiritual son, called it his “petit sensation,” his reaction, the response that he and he alone could make. Kelley loves the Chianti region, (the very word brings to mind the lovely wine it produces) and spends many months every year contemplating its contours and colours, its agriculture and vegetation, its vineyard and homesteads. He is celebrating the richness of the natural world, and the infinitely satisfying order into which it has been brought by human labour and intelligence. We love, as have all former generations, at a time of war and sadness, bloodshed and disaster, to have set before us a testimony to the things that do not go amiss, the warmth and sweetness of the world, which exists as certainly as the pain and cold. The neat ordered lines of the vineyards, the exquisite patternings of the trees, the noble slopes of the hills, long diagonals of the most heavenly pinks and shades of green: all are alive with an inner joy that Kelley has sensed and made visible. This is in no way a religious picture, but it is a profoundly spiritual one, a strong and gentle praise of the soil and its fruit, the reverent collaboration of man and nature, both creatures of a loving God. We long for order: we must labour for it. We long for beauty: we must seek for it. These longings are intrinsic to being human and it is gloriously enriching to find a mode of art that in its magnificent subtlety of colour and great awareness of form so satisfies the spirit.
