Exclusive: Jess Kelly is Bringing Her Gold-Kissed Canvases From Ireland to Atlanta

Jess Kelly’s paintings hang in a Donegal castle, a Michelin-starred dining room, and a luxury residence on Portugal’s Algarve coast. Next, they’re coming to Atlanta. The Irish-Mexican artist is setting up her American base in north Fulton County, and she shared the news with Haute Living first.

 Who Is Jess Kelly?

Kelly is a self-taught abstract artist based in Ireland. Her signature is texture: layers of her own handmade sculpting paste, complemented by luminous gold accents that catch and reflect the light. Alongside her original collections, Kelly creates bespoke commissions for private collectors and interior designers.

Her paintings are part of the permanent collection at Lough Eske Castle, the five-star hotel in County Donegal. She created a series for Dede at the Customs House, chef Ahmet Dede’s two-Michelin-star restaurant in West Cork, and her work anchors the showrooms of the Conrad Residences at Quinta do Lago in Portugal. Design firm Hill House Interiors has commissioned her for projects in London and Dubai.

Since 2024, she has held four solo exhibitions in Ireland. She is a VIP Power of Women nominee, and her collectors stretch from Ireland to the Middle East and the United States. She built all of it without a formal path. “I’m self-taught; I’ve built my career very organically,” Kelly says, “and so much of what I’ve achieved has come from following my instincts, working incredibly hard and building genuine relationships with the people around me.”

Why Atlanta

For Kelly, America was always the next step. She already has a strong base of U.S. collectors, and she wanted to be closer to them. She looked at several states and chose Atlanta for its design scene. “I just felt the interior design community, the art community in Atlanta is huge,” she says. “It felt like a natural next organic progression for me as an artist to go there and to have my base there.”

The city won her over fast. “From the stewardess on the airplane to the person at the car rental place, I fell in love with the energy of the place,” she says. “It really felt like home.”

She isn’t closing up shop in Ireland. Her studio there stays open, and she will keep working with her Irish and European clients, from private collectors to the interior designers she partners with. “I’m going to be between both places,” she says. “I can’t lose my Irish culture, and I can’t lose my Irish collectors.”  Ireland is hard to leave. “The country is like a warm hug,” Kelly says. “People are amazing. There’s just something so charming about Ireland that I don’t think you can find anywhere in the world.”

Irish Texture, Mexican Light

Kelly paints both halves of her heritage. Ireland gives her the texture. “Ireland has the most beautiful coastlines and landscapes,” she says. “I would use a lot of that to inspire the sculptural foundation of my work.”

Mexico gives her the color. “It’s bursting with color,” she says. “The sunset, golden light, that comes into the work.” Many of her Mexican pieces start with memory, of the summers she spent on the beach there. “I’m kind of merging both of my cultures into one piece.” She doesn’t paint postcards, though. “I don’t want to literally paint a landscape, and that’s literally what it is,” she says. “I like people to be able to interpret their own meaning from my artwork.” She expects Atlanta to add another layer.

Gold Is the Light

Every Kelly painting starts with texture. She lets herself fall into a flow state at that stage, without overthinking the finished piece, then builds color in layers from dark to light. The gold goes on last, transforming the piece and giving the surface an almost three-dimensional glow. To Kelly, the gold isn’t about luxury. “I feel it communicates light,” she says. “Throughout the time of the day, it looks completely different. I love that it translates from morning to night.”

The Art of Collaboration

This is the part Kelly most wants Atlanta to know. Beyond her original collections, she loves creating work for a specific person and a specific room. A commission starts with a conversation, often with a client’s interior designer: the feeling they want, the palette, the tones, how the piece fits the whole scheme.

She approaches each commission as a creative collaboration. “If it’s a statement piece and they want it to be loud because their interiors are quite muted, I will work that into the artwork,” she says. “If the room’s already quite loud in their materials or in their textures, I’ll mute down the piece.” She works from the designer’s own paint colors, swatches and materials to build her palette.

“I’m very collaborative by nature,” she says. “Whether I’m working with an interior designer, an architect or someone choosing a piece for their own home, I love understanding the story of a space and creating something that feels completely at home within it.” In Atlanta, she wants the same kind of partnerships. “That’s where my niche is, collaborating with a lot of that design community,” she says. She has already started reaching out to Atlanta designers and can’t wait to dive in.

Commissions That Start in the DMs

About 90 percent of Kelly’s clients find her on Instagram, and those conversations often run long. She takes the time to get to know each client, who they are and what they want the piece to mean, before she begins. The placements she treasures most aren’t the famous ones. They’re the ones with a story. At one of her exhibitions, a woman spent hours walking the room before Kelly went over to talk. Having lost her best friend, who had left her a gift, she was searching for something meaningful to remember her by. In Kelly’s painting Santorini, she saw angel wings.

“Now I can only see angel wings on it,” Kelly says. “Those are the most meaningful placements for me, because the emotional value of a piece can mean so much more than its monetary worth.” One current Instagram commission is her largest yet: a 2.6-meter painting, about 8½ feet, for a family home in Massachusetts. The client grew up in Galway.

Prints and Minis

Kelly wanted a way in for collectors who aren’t ready to commission, without diluting what makes the originals special. Her limited-edition prints took nearly three years to perfect, and only her most popular signature pieces are printed. The prints are of exceptional quality, while the originals retain their unique sculptural texture.

She also releases limited-edition minis. Fallen Feather launched as part of her WHISPERS collection, and she will release two new WHISPERS minis once she lands in Atlanta.

What Comes Next

Her first Atlanta collection is HORIZONS. “I actually began developing HORIZONS in Ireland knowing that this next chapter in Atlanta was ahead of me,” she says. “For me, it feels like a visual bridge between where I’ve come from and where I’m going.” Over the next five years, she would love gallery representation in Atlanta, New York, and Los Angeles, and more work in hotels, resorts, and other public spaces “that people are able to enjoy without having to actually commission pieces.”

She also wants to bring Ireland with her. “I know Americans have such a strong connection with Ireland,” she says. “I’d love to bring the Irish element to the American conversation.”

Ask her what the move is teaching her, and she answers fast: “To be comfortable with the uncomfortable, I’m not arriving thinking I have everything figured out,” she says. “I want to become part of the creative community here, meet people, collaborate, learn the city, and allow this next chapter to influence where my work goes.”

Find her on Instagram at @jesskelly.art or at jesskellyart.ie.