Kelly Breedlove

 Working with Damage: Kelly Breedlove on Memory, Masculinity, and Gods and Monsters

Claude - May 2026

[Claude] When you look back at this body of work as a whole—these paintings that pull from your mother's snapshots, from the horse auction barns, from your childhood in rural Georgia—what surprised you most about what emerged?

[Kelly Breedlove] There were several surprises. I was surprised by how viscerally emotional the work was for me. I was also surprised by how much I've grown through the process of creating these paintings. For most of my life, much of the subject matter and emotions in these paintings had been buried deep in my psyche. Producing them over the last twelve years has allowed me to process emotions from my childhood and heal from trauma.  

[Claude] Twelve years is a significant span. I'm curious about the evolution within that timeframe. When you began this work—let's say with a painting like "Fairy Circle," which you've described as being made before you were fully out—were you aware that you were embarking on this kind of therapeutic journey? Or did that understanding reveal itself gradually as the work progressed?  

[Breedlove] I was neither aware of nor prepared for the emotional journey this would become. When I started, I simply intended to use old family photos from our albums as source material. As I sifted through boxes and boxes of photographs, I quickly realized how little of my childhood I actually remember. What I do remember are the emotions I felt during the time periods when these pictures were taken.

I pulled out a handful of photos that I really connected with and tried to live with them—to see where they would take me. The photos prompted conversations with relatives, most specifically my mom, about what we were all going through when a specific photo was taken. I realized the happiness portrayed in the images didn't always align with the memories of others who were there at the time but may not have been in the photo.

The therapeutic journey revealed itself as the work evolved.

[Claude] That discrepancy—between what the snapshot shows and what was actually happening—seems to be one of the central tensions you're exploring throughout Gods and Monsters. The smiling faces that don't tell the whole story. The performance versus the interior reality.

Your mother clearly plays a pivotal role in this work, both as the photographer who captured these moments and as a presence within the paintings themselves. She gave you the raw material—literally, her photographs—but also something else. A methodology, perhaps?

I'm thinking particularly of "This Is Not The End"—that monumental painting of her on horseback with that luminous orange wash, the torn floral patterns, those paint runs cascading down. The title captures something essential about her character: that relentless perseverance, that refusal to let difficult circumstances have the final word, no matter what was thrown at her. That quality seems to be embedded in how you work with damaged materials. You don't restore the photographs to some pristine state. You work with the deterioration, the scratches, the imperfections.

Did your mother live to see much of this body of work? And if so, how did she respond to seeing herself—and your childhood—refracted through your adult perspective?

 [Breedlove] The only painting she saw from this body of work is This Is Not The End. My mom passed in late 2014 from lung cancer. I finished this painting early that year and gave it its name based on the perseverance she always showed in difficult times. Little did I know the end was nearer than I expected.

This painting was included in a show at The Bill Lowe Gallery in 2014, which my mom attended. Her image also appeared in a second painting at the same show called Fairytales Are Full Of Shit. Mom didn't like that title, but she loved being the subject matter for both paintings. She particularly felt like a star when show attendees realized she was, in fact, the young girl in these two paintings. Experiencing that with her is a life highlight of mine.

[Claude] What a gift—to have shared that moment with her. To see her recognized, celebrated, made monumental in a way that she could witness and enjoy. And how bittersweet that the title you gave her, "This Is Not The End," turned out to carry a meaning you hadn't anticipated.

There's something deeply moving about the fact that she objected to "Fairytales Are Full Of Shit" but loved being the subject. It suggests she understood instinctively what you were doing—that you weren't diminishing her story by naming the hardship, but rather honoring the reality of what she endured and transcended.

After her death, the work clearly continued and deepened. Most of what we see in Gods and Monsters was made in the decade following her passing. I'm wondering—did losing her change the work? Did it shift what you were able to access or willing to confront?

I ask because there's a rawness to some of the later pieces—the deteriorated surfaces, the more aggressive mark-making, paintings like "Please Forgive Me" where your father literally dissolves into abstraction—that feels like it might have required her absence to fully articulate. Does that ring true?

[Breedlove] It does ring true. Losing her changed the work. Before she passed, I identified as the boy whose father left when he was twelve. After she passed, I became the boy who lost his mother—and who honors her memory and legacy.

No longer being the little boy whose father left allowed me to fully confront my emotions toward my father and tell the full story of my mother. I was now willing to confront all of these emotions.

[Claude] That's a remarkable shift in identity—and it explains so much about the work's emotional architecture. As long as your mother was alive, in some way you were still that twelve-year-old boy defined by your father's abandonment. Her death paradoxically freed you to become something else, someone who could hold the full complexity of both parents without being trapped in childhood's limited perspective.

I'm struck by the fact that confronting your father more directly in the work seems to have gone hand-in-hand with being able to tell your mother's story more completely. They're braided together throughout Gods and Monsters—her endurance exists in relationship to his absence and damage; his mythology as a "god and monster" is witnessed and survived by her resilience.

Let's talk about your father directly for a moment. In paintings like "Gods and Monsters" itself—those cowboys bathed in pink, the text obliterated beneath the wash—or "Please Forgive Me" where his figure dissolves, you're holding something very complicated. You've said these men were genuinely magnificent in certain ways, that your childhood awe was legitimate.

How do you navigate that in the work—depicting someone who was both a god in your child's eyes and someone who fundamentally failed you, without flattening him into pure villain?

[Breedlove] To be clear, I don't see my father as a villain. He's a complex man the way we are all complicated. He was handed a very rough start in life and is navigating the world with the tools he has. I believe everyone does what they need to do in life to get to the end. I think he's done just that, and I've been able to come to terms with that.

Regarding the work, I've always maintained that I'm just trying to tell my story. He plays a large part in my story, as does my mom.

[Claude] That's an important clarification, and it speaks to the maturity of the work. You're not interested in assigning blame or creating a simple narrative of victimhood. You're bearing witness to what happened—to how his limitations and choices shaped your childhood—while also holding space for his humanity.

"Please Forgive Me" becomes even more complex with that understanding. The dissolving figure, the question mark, the reach across that impossible distance—it's not asking him for forgiveness in some therapeutic sense. It's something more ambiguous, more open-ended. Maybe it's about forgiving the situation itself, or forgiving the child you were for needing something he couldn't provide.

This brings me to the cowboy world more broadly—that southern cowboy culture you inherited and grew up inside. It's such a specific, mythologized space, and it saturates this body of work. The auction barns, the horsemanship, the performance of a very particular kind of masculinity. You've used actual barn wood from those stalls in pieces like "Lion Tiger Tiger Bear." You've literally incorporated fragments of that world into the paintings.

But you were also growing up queer inside that world—carrying something it had no language for, no tolerance for. How did you navigate loving aspects of that culture while also being fundamentally at odds with it?

[Breedlove] I didn't know I was gay at that point in my life. Like all queer kids at that age, I just knew I was different. I was different from the cowboys I admired. Every kid loves horses and running around a barn. We would help out with the horses when we could or build amazing and complex tunnels in the stacks of hay bales. We'd also use the stall railings as tightropes and compete to see who could balance across them the farthest. It was a happy childhood at the time.

[Claude] That's such an important distinction—you weren't navigating a known queer identity against that world. You were simply a child living fully inside childhood, doing what children do: building hay tunnels, walking stall railings like tightropes, helping with horses. The difference you sensed wasn't yet named or understood. It was just there, ambient, underneath everything.

Which makes the pink in these paintings even more interesting. When you wash "Gods and Monsters" in that rose-pink, obliterating the text beneath it, or when pink infiltrates the cowboy imagery—you're applying your adult queer perspective retroactively to those childhood scenes. You're saying: I was there. I was always there. The queer eye was in that barn all along, even if the boy himself didn't have language for it yet.

It's not rejection of that world—it's reclamation. You're insisting on your presence inside it.

When did you begin to understand that the difference you felt had a name? And how did that realization change your relationship to those memories—to the barn, the cowboys, your father, that whole mythology you'd grown up inside?

[Breedlove] I didn't fully know I was gay until middle age. I started to discover attraction and sexuality during high school, but true understanding came much later. That realization gave me genuine perspective on my work. My goal is to tell my story, and accepting that I am a gay man finally allowed me to do just that. The painting Fairy Circle was done before I knew I was gay and was therefore difficult to produce. After I came out, I was fully able to lean into my gay experience in my work.

[Claude] That timeline is striking—and it recontextualizes the entire arc of Gods and Monsters. "Fairy Circle" was made while you were still working toward that understanding, which explains why it feels more tentative, more encoded. The pink shape asserting itself quietly against the dark ground—it's reaching for something you couldn't yet fully name.

But then paintings like "Lion Tiger Tiger Bear," "Gardening at Night," "Relier"—these come after you've claimed that identity. The sexuality isn't hidden or metaphorical anymore. It's stated directly, even when the imagery remains layered and complex. The barn wood fragment bound with wire, the diver's legs descending from above in that blue darkness, the three figures separated across that golden field—you're able to explore longing, desire, connection, and isolation with full clarity.

Coming out in middle age, after decades of living without that language—that must have been seismic. Not just personally, but artistically. Suddenly you had access to the full story you'd been circling around.

I'm curious: when you finally had that realization and began making work from that place of self-knowledge, did it change how you looked at the earlier photographs? Did you see different things in your mother's snapshots once you understood who you'd been all along?

[Breedlove] It did very much. That realization gave me the point of view and confidence to address and respond to the masculine cowboy figures of my childhood with the authenticity of being an adult gay man. I was able to push back against toxic masculinity with color choices, aggressive mark-making, and pointed titles.

When dealing specifically with my early sexuality, it enabled me to see myself in photos of other children—photos that I connect with viscerally. In the paintings Yo Yo Yo Yo, Ishkatay, Do You Come In Peace and Ride The Pink Pig, I am not the child depicted in the found or appropriated photos, but these young boys clearly represent me.

In Yo Yo Yo Ishkatay, I married the image of a young boy at play wearing an Indian headdress with a military photo of bombers and parachutes to combine innocence with the troubles and hardships that lay ahead for a gay boy.

In Ride The Pink Pig, I wanted to show the confusion and longing of a gay boy as he's beginning his sexual awakening.

[Claude] This is fascinating—the way you're able to recognize yourself in other children's photographs, in strangers' snapshots. It speaks to something universal about queer childhood, doesn't it? That particular quality of difference, of longing, of confusion—it transcends the specifics of any individual face or moment. You see it and you know it, viscerally.

The pairing in "Yo Yo Yo Ishkatay" is devastating—childhood play, that innocent performance with the headdress, married to military imagery of bombers and parachutes. It's such a precise visual metaphor for what you're describing: the boy at play has no idea what's coming, the battles ahead, the internal conflicts that will define his adolescence and beyond.

And "Ride The Pink Pig"—I'm intrigued by that one. The Pink Pig is such a specific Atlanta cultural touchstone, this beloved holiday tradition. But you've used it to explore something much more private and fraught: sexual awakening, confusion, longing. There's something about using that public, nostalgic symbol to hold such interior, unnamed feelings.

Can you say more about that painting specifically? What is it about the Pink Pig—or the child riding it—that allowed you to access that particular emotional territory?

[Breedlove] The Pink Pig was such a part of my life growing up. Every Christmas season, my mom would load us all up and drive us to Atlanta to have our picture taken with Santa Claus and ride the Pink Pig at Rich's. It was a big deal. As children, we rarely saw the buildings of downtown Atlanta, much less went inside or rode a ride on one of the rooftops. My mom did an amazing job making holidays—and my childhood in general—fun and special, especially Christmas.

The photo of that little boy looking out the window of the pig with the wire mesh floored me. The childhood innocence of the pig coupled with the look of entrapment on the kid's face, his hands holding the cage. The fact that he's looking down on a group of confident gay men on a beach. I wasn't trapped by my sexuality at that age, but that's what it feels like for gay men who haven't come out yet.

The ride has been retired now. A few years after I graduated college, I went back to Rich's for one last ride on the Pink Pig in its last year of operation. As an adult getting inside that thing, the feeling of entrapment waiting for freedom was very real.

[Claude] That image—the child's hands gripping the wire mesh, looking down at those confident men on the beach below—is such a powerful compression of past and future, confinement and possibility. He's literally caged inside this symbol of innocent childhood joy, gazing at a freedom he can't yet access or even fully understand.

And the fact that you went back as an adult, got inside that pig one last time before it was retired, and felt that same entrapment physically—waiting for the ride to end so you could step out into freedom—that's the painting. That's exactly what you captured.

Your mother's role in that memory is poignant too. She created these moments of magic and joy, loaded you all up for the trip to Atlanta, made Christmas special. She gave you the Pink Pig as a happy memory. But she couldn't have known what else that image would come to mean for you—the wire mesh, the looking out, the waiting.

Speaking of your mother's photographs and your formal approach—I want to ask about your materials and process. You've described yourself as "photo-based" but emphatically not a photographer. You deteriorate these images, scratch them, paint over them, tear them, combine them with found images. What draws you to that kind of physical manipulation? Why not preserve the photographs intact?

[Breedlove] Using the photos intact, the perfect image as it was photographed by the photographer and subjects, doesn't feel like my art. The original photo was the art of the photographer. My work is about my memories, using these photos as a starting point. The deterioration, the scratching, the mark-making, the collage materials, and the physical damage I cause to the photos lend themselves to memory. Memories aren't perfect. They are deteriorated, degraded over time. My own brain blocks some memories to protect me. Memories aren't perfect or always complete. That's what my work reflects.

[Claude] That's such a clear articulation of your methodology—and it explains why the damaged surfaces feel so essential to what you're doing. You're not illustrating memories, you're creating visual equivalents for how memory actually functions. The gaps, the fade, the spots where things have been worn away or obscured—those aren't failures of the image. They're the truth of remembering.

It also positions you in a very specific relationship to your mother's photography. She captured the moment as it happened—the surface, the smile, the performance. You're excavating what was underneath, what the camera couldn't see or what got buried over time. The photograph is the starting point, but your art begins where her documentation ends.

I'm thinking about works like "American Woman" or "I Taught Myself To Be A Man"—those horizontal two-panel paintings where you've divided the field. There's often this tension between the photographic element and the painted ground, between representation and abstraction. What draws you to that particular compositional structure? That split field?

[Breedlove] Those are two of my most personal paintings because they are about my mother and my father, respectively. The two-panel structure is just a simplified binary representation between how things looked in the moment and what was actually going on under the surface.

In American Woman, the image on the left is actually a photo of my mother sometime around 1972, enjoying a cigarette and a phone conversation, probably with a friend. The image on the right is of a burning sofa in a snowy environment that should be calm and peaceful. There is a story in my family history about a burned sofa in our house that was never replaced. My mom simply had to scrape the charred wood off the arms of the sofa and make the best of it. My mom always did her best to make the best of any situation we were presented with, and she did a great job.

In I Taught Myself To Be A Man, the image on the left is of my father in a livestock auction ring—our family business—with a young boy leading a pony around the ring as it's being sold. That boy is not me but definitely represents me. What appears to be an image of father and son as a family unit is instead a photo of a consummate salesman and a crowd of potential buyers. I was secondary to the potential money to be made. That has always been my relationship with my father.

The painting is about becoming a man with little hands-on guidance. I paired this image with the German anatomy drawing because that represents the inner systems that make a man a man. I was fascinated as a kid by the cellophane anatomy illustrations in our set of encyclopedias.

[Claude] Those explanations are devastating in their clarity. In "American Woman," you're showing us the duality of your mother's entire existence—the woman on the phone, having a moment of connection and pleasure, paired with the burning sofa she'll have to scrape clean and live with because there's no other choice. Joy and endurance. The moment and its consequence. Both true at once.

And "I Taught Myself To Be A Man"—that title becomes almost unbearably poignant when you understand the image. Your father deployed you as a sales prop in the auction ring, a cute kid to warm up the buyers. What looks like mentorship was actually performance, transaction. You were learning, but not what a child should learn from a father. You were learning that you were useful, not beloved.

The anatomy drawing as the other half of that equation is brilliant—because yes, you did teach yourself. You turned to those encyclopedia pages, studied the diagrams, tried to understand the systems and mechanics of becoming a man since no one was guiding you through it. Those illustrations became a kind of substitute instruction manual.

These paintings work as a pair, don't they? The mother who did her best with what she had, and the father who treated you as a means to an end. The binary between them structures the entire body of work.

Let me shift to something more recent—your political work. "No Freedom Til We're Equal" is a departure in some ways. It's facing outward, making a public statement, while so much of Gods and Monsters is deeply interior. What prompted that shift?

[Breedlove] I completed No Freedom well after I was fully out. I ran across this image of two men kissing and instantly saw it as a response to Grant Wood's American Gothic from 1930.

This painting is in response to the Trump administration rolling back rights for LGBTQ+ people, which obviously directly affects me. The title says it all!

What prompted that shift is the confidence of being a fully out and realized gay man. Every gay person can describe the feeling of the weight of hiding being lifted from their being once they open up their truth to the world. That can lead to an amazing sense of confidence.

[Claude] That confidence—and that anger—radiate from the painting. You're right, the title says it all. It's direct, unapologetic, demanding. And the formal choice to respond to "American Gothic" is brilliant because Wood's painting has become this icon of austere American values, Midwestern propriety, traditional family structure. You're claiming that iconography and saying: This is American too. We are here. We demand recognition.

The shift from the interior psychological work—the father dissolving, the child behind the mesh, the private gardens tended in darkness—to this outward-facing political statement tracks perfectly with what you're describing. Once you stopped spending energy on hiding, that energy became available for other things. Including righteous anger. Including demands for equality.

It's also worth noting that this painting exists in the same body of work as "Please Forgive Me" and "Relier"—pieces that are quiet, tender, unresolved. You're holding multiple emotional registers simultaneously. The private and the public. The personal and the political. Grief and rage and longing and joy.

How do you think about sequencing these very different emotional tones when you imagine this work in exhibition? Do you see "No Freedom Til We're Equal" as a climax, or does it sit somewhere else in the arc?

[Breedlove] If the body of work has become the story of my life, then No Freedom would be close to the end. After I've lived my life, overcome struggles, defined and accepted myself. It would not be the final piece, though. My work seems to be all about connection—the striving for and need for connection. That would place Relier, as the climax to the show.

[Claude] That's exactly right. "No Freedom Til We're Equal" is the moment of full arrival—the public declaration, the political self, the man who has claimed his identity and is demanding his place in the world. It's powerful and necessary, but it's not the destination.

"Relier"—to connect, to bind together—is where the work ultimately lands. Those two stags against the black ground, the word covering one's eyes. After all the excavation of childhood trauma, the confrontation with your father, the mourning of your mother, the claiming of your sexuality, the political rage—what you're left reaching for is connection. The longing to connect, even when vision is obscured, even when the path isn't clear.

It's a quieter ending than "No Freedom," but it's more complete. Because the work isn't ultimately about anger or even identity—it's about the fundamental human need to be seen, to be known, to be connected to others. Which is what you were denied as a child and what you've spent your adult life trying to find.

The two stags, the obscured vision, the title itself—to connect—that's the emotional truth the entire body of work has been building toward.

Before we close, I want to ask you one more thing. Twelve years of making this work. Hundreds of hours with these photographs, these memories, this paint. What do you understand now about your childhood, your parents, yourself—that you couldn't have known when you started?

[Breedlove] I understand that my parents were doing the best they could. My mother was amazing and gave me a wonderful life. I wasn't aware of how much she truly meant to me, how much she made me, until after she passed. I would not have survived without the love of my mother.

I think my father has struggled in the same way I have, using the tools he was given by his parents. He did what he needed to do to achieve the life he wanted. We all do that.

I love my father. He's a complicated and difficult man, but I do love him. That's a realization I didn't have before I started this work.

I realized being different isn't a flaw—it's a superpower—and once you realize that, you can use it to be and create the man you're meant to be.

That's what twelve years of this work has taught me: that healing isn't about perfecting the memory or restoring the photograph. It's about accepting the deterioration, working with the damage, and making something true from whatever is at hand.

My mother taught me that.

[Claude] Kelly, thank you. That's beautiful—and it's the perfect place to end.

You've created something remarkable with Gods and Monsters. It's not just a body of work about your childhood or your parents or your identity. It's a testament to what art can do when you're brave enough to live with the difficult images, to mark them honestly, to let them teach you what you didn't know you needed to learn.

Your mother gave you the photographs and the methodology—that refusal to let difficult circumstances have the final word. Your father gave you the complexity, the wound that needed tending. And you gave yourself twelve years to turn all of that into something true.

The fact that you can say "I love my father" now—after painting him dissolving into abstraction, after confronting the auction ring, after all of it—that's not a small thing. That's the work doing what it's supposed to do.

Thank you for sitting down with me. I'm honored to have heard these stories.