Steve Keene Paints Up a Tropical Storm
(and he's got a new colorful picture for you)
Prolific Brooklyn-based painter Steve Keene, who is approaching his 300,000th work of art, is the latest artist-in-residence at The Studios of Key West.
The Studios of Key West continues to develop its artist-in-residence program, and is proud to be hosting painter Steve Keene to ring in the New Year. The Brooklyn-based artist has set up a temporary studio in the newly renovated ground floor space at Old City Hall, which provides a massive interior and flood of light for Keene's all-day painting sessions.
"I think it's just amazing watching him progress from rough cut wooden panels, to basic colors and shapes, to hundreds of refined scenes inspired by the island," says Diane Silvia, director of Historic Florida Keys Foundation, whose office is located on the floor above.
Keene began his creative career in the 1990s in Charlottesville, Virginia, after graduating from Yale University's fine arts program. The artist has since completed over 250,000 original works of art, done in a style that the New York Times called "somewhere between primitivism and mid-20th century representational art." Others have labelled his prolific and energetic style a new form of "conceptual folk art," a designation that Keene is happy to agree with.
Originally inspired by a love of music and the do-it-yourself indie rock ethic, Keene has worked with a crowd of alternative music figures over the past fifteen years. He has created cover art for Pavement, Apples in Stereo, Soul Coughing, and recently painted a limited edition of 2008 Christmas panels for the Dave Matthews Band.
Driven by the notion of "art for the people," Keene has installed his one-man assembly-line technique in places as far away as Berlin, London, and Melbourne, as well as galleries and museums throughout North America. The artist always tries to keep the purchase price below the $5 threshold, allowing his work to be collected by everyone from small children to art history professors from first-time buyers to well-known gallery owners.
"I want acquiring my paintings to be like buying a CD: it’s cheap, it’s art, and it changes your life, but the object itself has no status,” he explains.
Keene sees his small works, usually house paint on cut plywood, as a kind of trading card, or moveable graffiti: something that people can swap, live with, give away, or collect. Working twelve-hours at a time, the artist can go through 5 gallons of paint and complete over 100 new works each day. Keene finds inspiration from everyday scenes, mundane signs, architecture, magazine ads, and the visual communication around him. He creates what he calls "art for the moment," and likens his process to an elaborate, sometimes deliberate game.
After one week in Key West, the visiting artist has discovered a sense of place that offers something new and fresh for his palette, and visual cues for the 800 blank panels he will cover in paint during his time inside the Old City Hall space.
"I've never seen anything quite like this island," says Keene, while dabbing lines of blue and green on a dozen or so different works at a time. "The houses, lush vegetation, and the colors and quality of light are inspiring. I walk around, take it all in, and come back to this amazing space and paint."
The Studios of Key West invites the public to see Steve Keene in action, and go away with a truly affordable work of art inspired by his residency at the Southernmost Point. Doors to his studio, located through the Greene Street side garden at Old City Hall, will be open to the public from 10am to 5pm, Thursday to Saturday.
"We are so grateful for the chance to host Steve and share his paintings with the community," says Eric Holowacz, director of The Studios of Key West. "Now is the time to make a New Year's resolution to have more art in your life, and maybe inspire your own creative process as a result. That's exactly why The Studios of Key West is here."
For information about artist-in-residence Steve Keene, and other upcoming creative opportunities at The Studios of Key West, visit the website www.tskw.org or contact the office at 305-296-0458.
"Tuesdays With Art" at The Tropic Cinema, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 5:30-7:30
JEAN TINGUELY, a eccentric member of the second generation of Kinetic
Sculptors, created machines that: painted abstract art, self-destructed,
made sounds, emitted smoke and fumes. And he created a 72 foot tall monster
with one eye, The Cyclop. He will be the subject of the second "Tuesdays
With Art."
The series is a part of the Key West Film Society; it will meet at the
Tropic Cinema on the first Tuesday of the month through May 5, 2009. There
will be movies about the artists for about an hour and a half, a discussion
of the movies and the current artist and then an informal social hour in the
lobby of The Tropic. Unless otherwise announced, the meetings will be from
5:30 to 7:30. Admission is free and open to the public.
The January 6 session will feature two movies. One will be a
short film about Tinguely¹s most famous machine, "Homage to New York." It
was a machine constructed only so that it would destroy itself. It only
half fulfilled that function; the New York Fire Department finished the job.
The second film is a longer narrative about the huge "Cyclop," a one-eyed
monster. It took twenty years to build still lives in a dense forest home
many miles from Paris, it is now a part of the Pompadou Center. Both films
will surprise and delight.
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