ken kelleher depicts cars and motorcycles as sculptural art pieces in digital series

ken kelleher digitally sculpts cars and motorcycles

Metallic car designs that bulge and slope, and life-size motorcycle models that balloon with pillowy paddings. Ken Kelleher’s digital art pieces on vehicles borrow their elements from whimsical dream sequences and hypnotic attraction toward grandeur design inquiries and possibilities.

His pink metallic car packs a rear with swelling bumps that narrow to two exhaust vents. He strips his black vehicle from having any doors, windows, and views, and retains its headlights and hood. The enclosure for his dandelion-colored car rises and falls like rugged mountains, gifting the overall design the look of a palm-sized mouse for a computer.

Mellow Yellow | images courtesy of Ken Kelleher

The element of surprise compels Kelleher to boost his digital sculptures with instilled mystery and transient jolt. Viewers narrow their eyes to fully scrutinize the realness of his art pieces. What goes behind the windowless cars and under the puffy motorcycles is up to the viewers’ discretion and imagination.

Part of the artist’s slant comes through as he believes that ‘you create something that has never before existed in the world until you created it.’ For Kelleher, his pursuit of delight and element of surprise from the get-go bubbles up as he says, ‘this phase of creation is the phase in which what you made is still brand new to you. It has been born out of you. It didn’t exist before, and now it does.’

Pink Bubblegum Sport

Making forms in drawings real

Ken Kelleher disperses his artistic codes in a maelstrom of alleyways, from large-scale installations to digital art pieces. His state of mind nudges him to sketch first and let the draft unfold into rough renderings using his computer. First, he creates his virtual sketches and lets them brew for a while. He inquires then on how he can turn them into tangible products of art and design.

‘Once I create the renderings, I research how they could be done and connect with people who I think would be right for the project,’ he says. The artist slash creative director in digital design eyes sculptures more for the reason of tangible creations. In his new digital art pieces, his ethos to bring about playful, life-size and -like sculptural cars and motorcycles stately manifest.

Black Beauty

Kelleher curates his personal design language by experimenting. He’s worked on wood, steel, fiberglass, tape, plastic, and his materials portfolio keeps on growing. Going digital for his oeuvre illustrates his drive to expand and create through creative mediums.

He says that he makes sculptures based on a dialogue with the materials, ‘and with my imagination, sometimes form appear in a drawing, and I am inspired to make them real.’ His cars and motorcycles digital art carves a virtual path for the American creative to play with the automotive fans’ wondering visions on the what-if designs of vehicles.

Orange Stryker