Ellsworth Kelly - Childhood

Childhood

Kelly was born the second son of three to Allan Howe Kelly and Florence Bithens Kelly in Newburgh, New York, a town approximately 60 miles north of New York City. His father was an insurance company executive of Scots-Irish and German descent. His mother was a former schoolteacher of Welsh and Pennsylvania-German stock. His family moved from Newburgh to New Jersey shortly after he was born. Kelly remembers his mother moving his family each year to a different house. They lived in many places in New Jersey both in and around the Hackensack area.

Many of Kelly’s memories are of the time they lived in Oradell a town of nearly 7,500 people. His family lived near the Oradell Reservoir, where his paternal grandmother Rosenlieb introduced him to bird watching at the age of eight or nine. Bird watching helped Kelly train his eyes and develop his appreciation for the physical reality of the world by focusing on nature’s shapes. He developed his passion for form and color. As part of his interest, he studied the works of Louis Agassiz Fuertes and John James Audubon. Audubon had a particularly strong influence on Kelly’s work throughout his career. Author E.C. Goossen speculates that the two and three-color paintings (such as Three Panels: Red Yellow Blue, I 1963) for which Kelly is so well known can be traced to his bird watching, and his study of the two and three-color birds he saw so frequently at an early age. Kelly has said he was often alone as a young boy and became somewhat of a "loner". He had a slight stutter that persisted into his teenage years.