Donald Keefe

UNTITLED CONSTRUCT 2 - Abstract/Figurative Oil Painting in Green, Blue, & Grey

2018

"I don’t do enough red paintings. I like red, but somehow it doesn’t end up in my work all that often, or it ends up pretty muted and earthy by the end. When I was lighting the sculpture upon which this painting is based, I knew I wanted to do something with the red lights I had. As with previous work, this painting explores entanglement as both a compositional structure and as an artistic idea. The representational part of the painting is pushed as close to a photographic rendering as I could at the time. Meanwhile, I’ve contrasted that with flat graphic elements. I also wanted to do something interesting with the cast shadow of the form: whereas in some previous works in the series the main form either had a traditional cast shadow grounding the it to the illusion of a ground plane, or no cast shadow which left it floating within the shallow depth of the image, in Untitled Construct 5 I wanted to do something more specific with the cast shadow. The idea came to me to invert it to be pure white. Technically this was a bit of a challenge because the whitest oil paints take months to dry – so this work had quite a bit of ‘sit and wait time’ between layers. Personally, I enjoy the composition of this painting because the red attracts the eye towards the bottom left of the painting, but the contrasting movements in black, gray and white pull the eye up and over...

I have sketchbooks filled with small thumbnail drawings which I usually base compositional arrangements upon. These are non-representational: just lines, arcs, mass tones, etc – basically just playing with formal elements. I had an idea to recreate these doodles as small sculptures. I liked the results, and wanted to have it feed back into my painting work as an intermediate step. That idea grew and I began lighting the sculptures with colored lights...

Continuing a series of formal investigations that blur the lines between representational, flat, and abstract painting approaches, I created Untitled Construct 3. As with previous wo...

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