Morris Henderson

Kathleen Keifer is a California based internationally collected artist. She is a leading force of New California Realism. With a high level of technical virtuosity, Keifer creates a new sense of reality with textures and colors that seem to add lighting effects and distinct shadows, confronting the viewer with new interpretations of familiar objects. Keifer’s paintings invite the viewer to consider the complex relationship between time and timelessness. It is the sheer visual interaction between the elements, taken in their bare simplicity that interests her. For her, the painting captures the very essence of time and its passage. She believes that actual sites and places have individual magic. The goal is to take objects from popular culture and paint them in a new narrative context. Her complex approaches to popular board games present the subjects as living, tangible objects. Keifer’s interest took her to paint bits and pieces of board games. Her husband had been designing and inventing board games for thirty years and her homes and studios are filled with games and playing pieces. She is fascinated with the response these board games (and bits and pieces) evoke in us as adults. Sure there's the tug of childhood and nostalgia, the innocence of playing a game with clear rules and clear winners. But somehow these board games live in an unconscious dream-realm where they represent something more than the detritus of playtime. All the while she is painting them in the context of living in Los Angeles, a cultural capital filled with pop art and pop culture. Born and raised in Chicago, Kathleen Keifer is a second-generation artist. Her mother, also a fine artist, exposed Keifer to the world of art and supervised her training from a very early age. This legacy continues today as Keifer closely nurtures the development of the artistic leaning in each of her three daughters, inspiring a third generation of female artists. Her works are represented by Artspace Warehouse, Los Angeles and have been exhibited and collected internationally, including Chicago, New York and London.

It could be argued that cave walls were the canvases for the world’s first landscape paintings, which depict and elevate natural scenery through art, but there is a richer history to consider.

The Netherlands was home to landscapes as a major theme in painting as early as the 1500s, and ink-on-silk paintings in China featured mountains and large bodies of water as far back as the third century. Greeks created vast wall paintings that depicted landscapes and grandiose garden scenes, while in the late 15th century and early 16th century, landscapes were increasingly the subject of watercolor works by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Bartolomeo.

The popularity of religious paintings eventually declined altogether, and by the early 19th century, painters of classical landscapes took to painting out-of-doors (plein-air painting). Paintings of natural scenery were increasingly realistic but romanticized too. Into the 20th century, landscapes remained a major theme for many artists, and while the term “landscape painting” may call to mind images of lush, grassy fields and open seascapes, the genre is characterized by more variety, colors and diverse styles than you may think. Painters working in the photorealist style of landscape painting, for example, seek to create works so lifelike that you may confuse their paint for camera pixels. But if you’re shopping for art to outfit an important room, the work needs to be something with a bit of gravitas (and the right frame is important, too).

Adding a landscape painting to your home can introduce peace and serenity within the confines of your own space. (Some may think of it as an aspirational window of sorts rather than a canvas.) Abstract landscape paintings by the likes of Korean painter Seungyoon Choi or Georgia-based artist Katherine Sandoz, on the other hand, bring pops of color and movement into a room. These landscapes refuse to serve as a background. Elsewhere, Adam Straus’s technology-inspired paintings highlight how our extreme involvement with our devices has removed us from the glory of the world around us. Influenced by modern life and steeped in social commentary, Straus’s landscape paintings make us see our surroundings anew.

Whether you’re seeking works by the world’s most notable names or those authored by underground legends, find a vast collection of landscape paintings on 1stDibs.