Every once in a while, during this rag-tag journey we are all on, someone pulls you over, sits you down on a log and tells you to stop staring at your feet and look up at the horizon.
Then you realise the world is a big place and the picture we are all travelling through is a big picture.
Bill Kelly was a big picture man.
Bill was an artist, writer, teacher, thinker, collaborator and activist whose art went beyond the boundaries of aesthetics or pictures hanging in galleries to encompass a lifelong conversation around non-violence and human rights.
Although he operated on a global level, with his works exhibited in more than 20 countries, guest lectureships at Oxford, Cambridge and Yale universities, and talks in prisons and schools, he always brought his message about the importance of art and culture back to the grass roots of ordinary people and communities.
Born into a tough north American neighbourhood of gangs and street violence, Bill became a truck driver and welder before taking up art studies and coming to Australia in 1968 on a Fulbright scholarship.
For the last two decades of his life, Bill chose to live with his ceramicist wife, Veronica, just up the road from Shepparton.
I first met him 20 years ago as a reporter for the News when I was told of a fellow who lived in Nathalia who had just published a book called Art and Humanist Ideals: Contemporary Perspectives.
As I drove up the Shepparton-Barmah Rd to interview him, two thoughts occupied my mind.
First: what on earth is this book and its weighty title all about?
Second: what the hell is this global peace campaigner, international artist and intellectual writer doing living in Nathalia?
As far as I knew there had been no peace marches or United Nations panel discussions on human rights held in this little town on the banks of the Broken Creek. The nearest Nathalia came to public art was its giant water tower in the main street.
I was met at the front door of the old bank building in Blake St by a woman who fizzed with electric energy and who led me down a dark corridor into a kitchen with an old stained sink, a draining board with hand-made cups covered in colourful mosaics and an old fridge plastered with sticky notes and drawings. This was not the domain of magazine kitchen appliance people. At a paper-strewn table sat her husband in khaki work clothes and a shock of unkempt white hair. This was William Kelly — global peace campaigner, former Dean of the Victorian College of the Arts, founding and honorary life member of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and soon-to-be recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award whose previous recipients included Mother Teresa, Muhammad Ali and John Lennon among others.
To say I was a little nervous would be an understatement.
What followed was an hour-length conversation about the power of small communities and ordinary people to change the world through art. We also talked about humanism, philosophy, the environment, Gandhi, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Young, Tolstoy, Goya and, of course, peace as the goal of all political dialogue.
This hour could have become turgid or repetitive, but it didn’t. It was a two-way dialogue of thought held together by Bill’s humility and mesmerisingly gentle north American accent. You had to lean in close to listen, and it was always worth it.
Over the next two decades I wrote about Bill and his global travels and also his grass-roots arts practice, which involved the opening of Nathalia’s GRAIN Store art gallery in 2010. The cultural space in Blake St has the clever acronym Growing Rural Arts In Nathalia and it has become a beacon for other country towns wanting to engage people in art and culture. It is also a perfect example of Bill’s commitment to continuing the conversation around art and peace at ground level.
William Kelly died at his Nathalia home on Friday, July 21, with his devoted wife, Veronica, and family of four children nearby.
Bill was still active in the years leading up to his death. In 2016 his giant artwork Peace or War: The Big Picture was hung in the public reading room of the Victorian State Library.
The following years were spent travelling the world with a film crew when Bill spoke with artists, thinkers, musicians, celebrities and activists about the power of art to promote non-violence.
The result was the 2019 documentary film The Big Picture: Can Art Stop a Bullet?
Bill’s answer was a practical one — art may not be able to stop a bullet, but it can stop a bullet from being fired.
All I can think of to say now that he is gone is — travel well, my friend. But I know he would laugh his soft laugh at this hackneyed phrase, because for Bill there was no after-life. He was a man of the moment who lived in the now not in the hereafter. He had no faith other than in humanity’s ability to stop a bullet being fired through the mysterious and life-changing power of its poetic expression.
• The film The Big Picture: Can Art Stop A Bullet? is being shown at Nathalia’s Uniting Church Hall from 6pm on Saturday, August 5.
Tickets are $20 available from The GRAIN Store or trybooking.com