Artist Kelcey Fisher is a big deal right now in the Los Angeles arts scene, but he’s already looking into the future.
“My dream is to have a massive workspace and studio loft and host my own shows in it,” he says. “I want to own a gallery.”
These are big dreams, but things are happening fast for the artist. In the four years that Fisher has been professionally pursuing a career in art, his work has appeared throughout the city. Currently, one of his murals hangs at the Justice Urban Tavern in downtown, another can be seen at the Venice Whaler in Venice Beach, and there’s a also a piece hanging up in the offices of the Paloma Group.
Fisher’s style is immediately recognizable: think huge faces of Mick Jagger, Bob Marley, Clint Eastwood, or Keith Haring gazing out from strikingly patterned backgrounds. The colors are bold, the brushstrokes often thick and resembling tattoos. Fans say they like his “unique style that bridges the gap between studio and street art” and his “eternal sense of warmth.”
Although he came up with his signature artistic style not too long ago, Fisher has been interested in art since he was a child. His mother was his preschool art teacher, and he painted all throughout high school and college.
“My senior year of college, my work started selling really well,” he says. “It took off from there.”
His pieces are sometimes multimedia. For example, his latest large-scale piece—a sprawling mural for WeWork’s new Santa Monica location—includes bits of glass and wood to create texture. All the materials were inspired by the history of Santa Monica itself, specifically the Native American Gabrielino-Tongva people who inhabited the Los Angeles basin.
“The broken mirror represents the volcanic glass that the tribe members would trade when they came into the port,” he explains. “The wood triangles were based off their sacred burial grounds.”
The woman in the mural is a friend of Fisher’s who ended up painting a few brush strokes onto the piece.
“I like working with figures and friends and having it be a process that we’re all working together on,” he says.
Besides the model, Fisher’s managers Brent Totty and Justin Hill of Grit Collective lent him a hand as well.
Totty says he decided to sign Fisher after a mutual friend introduced them.
“Kelcey had some amazing art up on the wall, and we all just started talking about what it was that he did,” says Totty. “We didn’t know exactly how it was going to work at the beginning. Kelcey was a good friend of ours and we wanted to help in any way we could.”
Along with his collaboration with Grit Collective, Fisher has teamed up with Art Unified, a gallery in Venice that sells his work, and Club W, a wine organization that used one of his images on the label of a bottle.
Since he signed on with Grit Collective, Fisher says he has increased his workload and become more efficient with the professional side of his career.
“Early on, I was doing everything myself,” he says. “I didn’t have the Grit Collective team helping me out with the business aspect of it. Doing large-scale solo murals and putting together shows and managing everything by yourself is not that easy.”
Fisher says he’s happy to have his friends along for the ride.
“All the other artists in Grit Collective are friends I’ve brought on,” he says. “It’s cool to be working with all your friends. We have this little community, and we all help each other, and I want it to keep progressing. Maybe it’ll turn into something bigger.”
WeWork x KFiSH x Purveyor Works Mural Project from Grit Collective on Vimeo.
Photo credit: Salvador Ochoa