What I’m all about

It’s Me, Kelly!

i started this thing. i make paintings, oyster plates, and objects built for a very good dinner party - the kind you'd actually want to be invited to. ☻

A woman with long blonde hair and red lipstick leaning against a colorful mural on a brick wall, with a relaxed expression.

the mariachi didn’t
come from nowhere.

i'm originally from new york, but savannah had other plans. i've lived here long enough now that the city permanently rewired my brain a little - somewhere between the humidity, the antiques, the oysters, and the fact that everything here looks vaguely haunted, my work started becoming what it is now.

savannah is where the work lives. but a lot of it started somewhere else.

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A woman with long black hair, wearing a black top, blue jeans, and colorful sandals, stands next to an easel with a brightly colored painting in a decorated living room with vintage furniture and wall decorations.
A stylized drawing of a five-petaled flower with pink and black accents, featuring a circular center and decorative outlines on each petal.
A drawing of a fish on a decorative platter with black berries and fern leaves.

i have a belief that if i put all of myself into the work, i'll find my people eventually.

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Where it comes from

i travel alone a lot. europe is beautiful. but nothing has ever done to me what mexico and guatemala and belize have done. something about that part of the world got into my paintings and my plates and my whole way of seeing and never left.

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What people find surprising

i still work a nine to five. i make art in every hour around it. i've been doing it that way long enough to know that's not a limitation - that's just how it works. some paintings happen at midnight. some ideas show up while walking my dogs before work. some things take three years. some things take an afternoon. the job has nothing to do with it.

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What this place is

maritime merle became a place for all of it to live together: the paintings, the oyster plates, the strange vacation energy, the sentimentality, the tablescapes, the jet ski mariachi. honestly, i think i'm just trying to make things that feel the way certain nights do.

Two small black and gray fluffy dogs with pink tongues out, sitting on a white float in a swimming pool. In the background, there is a house with beige siding, a brown roof, and a dark fence with metal poles supporting a screen or netting. The sky is overcast.

The Name, Explained

the water, the dogs, and the name they made.

  • i grew up on long island, close to the water, and didn't think much of it at the time. then i moved to savannah, which is surrounded by marsh and tide in a different way. somewhere in between those two places, water stopped being scenery and started showing up in a lot of things i paint.

  • mavi and berlin are my two blue merle pomeranians. mavi is named after the turkish word for blue. berlin is named after the character from casa de papel. they have never set a table in their lives but they have been present for every single painting i've made.

  • half place, half dogs. the most accurate name i could've picked :)