Stories from the sea

Swept up by Kelly Tunstall’s "Sea of Love"

By Jolene Torr
Published: August 28th, 2009 | 4:50pm

There’s always something a bit tragic and sensational about sea stories— that passion for the open sea, for the things that drift away. The sea is the place where men choose to be, where the ladies along the way are as fleeting as ever… a life of squandered happiness.

But this is not a story of old flames and hard feelings. “We live in the present,” says artist Kelly Tunstall of “Sea of Love,” her joint show with fellow artist and husband Ferris Plock. “There are a few pieces that tell parts of our story,” she says. “But we mix other people’s in too. We’re both rather organic storytellers, so we make it up as we go along essentially.”

Very pregnant and just weeks from her due date, Tunstall struggles to find a comfortable seat at the bar. It’s opening night for her exhibit at San Francisco’s 111 Minna, and the gallery is waterlogged with hipsters and other young art-lovin’ folk. “Our collaboration is a really natural one. When we first started dating we just said, let’s try working on a piece together, so we set up a twenty-foot mural project, took a couple days and just went for it. And it worked. And it was fun.” Four years later and over a year into their marriage, they’re expecting their first kid.

The pieces are large-scale, drawn on wood panels and set to dramatic lighting. The contrasts are high, with soft, muted, chaparral colors, heavy black outlines, and bold thick bands. Tunstall handles the female roles with her husband at the helm for the masculine, both artists solid in their highly stylized renditions. “We are pretty aligned in life as we are in art,” says Tunstall of her marriage to Plock. “But our perspectives have become closer the longer we’ve been together.” The men are wild-eyed, delirious with wanderlust while the women are serene, swan-necked creatures of the sea.

Drawing some techniques from her time at the California College of Art, Tunstall uses the bold geometries and spatial understandings required of a graphic designer. “I need to work with my left brain and right brain,” she says of her process. Formally trained, she can handle classical figure painting, no problem. But that’s not what she’s interested in.

Like the art of the ‘60s, in Tunstall’s work there is the desire to move elsewhere — to not focus on this present or this social time, but some other world. “My path has been always striving to see and then translate into the world what’s floating around upstairs.” Translating these dreamy figures to the canvas is Tunstall’s talent. With the design aesthetic of ‘60s starbursts paired with steampunky flying contraptions, “Sea of Love” draws you in with its hasty characters waiting for their sirens’ calls.

Her work is on exhibit through August 29, 2009. View more of Tunstall's work on her Web site, kellytunstall.com.