T. Byron Kelly

Poet, Painter and Musician T. Byron Kelly has been working as an active performance artist in the South Western Virginia area (Appalachia) for over three decades and has generations of family from West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia. Live, spontaneous lyric poetry performances and gallery exhibits have been at the heart of the Poet's work. As an Undergraduate and Graduate student, Byron studied with poets Nikki Giovanni, Lucinda Roy, Grace Bauer and Anne Bromley, as well as novelist Don Secreast and painter Janet Niewald. Byron received private art instruction during that time and was also a member of Tri-M (Modern Music Masters honor society). Byron studied the relationships between poetry, painting and music and soon began to illustrate his own poems with paintings and put them to music as well. Byron has also taught creative writing and composition on the college level (Virginia Tech and New River College) and is a member of, Studio Appalachia , Spectral Arts, Project Morning Star, Dark Horse Poets, North/South Appalachia, the Appalachian Writers Association (A.W.A.), the Appalachian Authors' Guild (A.A.G.), West Virginia Writers, the Virginia Writers Club, the XYZ Gallery (Blacksburg, VA.), Gallery Appalachia, Gray Gallery Glencoe Museum (Radford, VA.) and the Montgomery Museum and Lewis Miller Regional Art Center (Christiansburg, VA).

I paint poems and found a kind of home there> My paintings have always been rather cartoon like and fantastically oriented, a rendering of a dream if you will- I always thought (about realist art) that if you wanted a photograph then why not take a snapshot with a camera?

Project End of Days-Selected Poems & New Selected Poems available@Amazon.com

Poetry@ http://tbyron.livejournal.com

Music@ https://soundcloud.com/studioappal

Painting@ http://t-byron-k.pixels.com/

*Primary Influences Artistically> Alan Hovhaness /William Blake/ Li Ho/ Jim Morrison/ Dante Alighieri/ Mattie Stepanek/Maya Angelou/Rainer Maria Rilke/Robinson Jeffers/Kenneth Patchen/William Everson/Hermann Hesse/Johann Wolfgang von Goethe/Robert Bly/ Boris Pasternak/ Fredrico Garcia Lorca/E.A.Poe/Ekiwah Adler Belendez/John Milton/Nathaniel Hawthorne/Ralph Waldo Emerson/Matsuo Basho/ J.M.W.Turner/ Henry Fuseli/ John Martin/ Vincent Van Gogh/ Claude Monet/ Francisco de Goya/Bob Kane/Edvard Munch/ Gustav Klimt. /Tom Waits/Simple Minds/The Doors/Bjork/U2 /Brian Eno/Peter Gabriel/Tears For Fears/Cocteau Twins/The Cure/Patti Smith//