Mary Keithan
Bio
Mary Keithan - Artist
Mary Keithan is an accomplished artist. Her career spans over five decades beginning in the late 1960s. Keithan is both painter and photographer, choosing her medium to best convey her inspiration. Keithan’s paintings are powerful in their ability to bring you into a world of nature abstracted. She uses methods developed by the Abstract Expressionists during the 1950s, as seen in the painting of Jackson Pollock or Joan Mitchell where surface matters and the painter's expressive drips or strokes create the image. But unlike the Abstract Expressionists, Keithan does not aspire to form so much as use it along with all the powers of her art in the revelation of her inspiration, "the beauty in nature”. Keithan paints spontaneously and intuitively, using the surface as part of the evocation of depth, sometimes applying grit and sand to the paint to build up layers on the canvas, along with a masterful use of color. Paintings like her Tidepool Series and the Volcano Series abstract the potent forces of nature, while creating an immersive and emotive visual journey between the surface and layered depths of the canvas.
Keithan's photography is a continuation of her painted abstractions of nature. Since 2004, Keithan created her Everglades Series. She captured the native birds, reptiles, flora and fauna in sometimes seemingly acrobatic poses, or romantically colorful compositions, indicating a true relationship with their landscape. Taken with a clarity of focus, with all attempt to maintain honesty, Keithan's images capture the natural grace of the animal kingdom within the Everglades. Keithan's Everglades Series is just one of a number of photographic series she undertook. In the 1990s she began her study of Michigan's Heritage Barns and Michigan One-Room Schoolhouses. Sometimes abandoned, other times carefully maintained, these barns and schoolhouses are a continuation of Keithan's exploration of nature. With the sharp focus of the 8x10 camera, Keithan shares a singular appreciation of how American lives were once entwined with nature in a bucolic lifestyle. Each barn echoes the lives of the farmers that built them. It's a way of life that America is losing that Keithan longs for... to be daily within nature. The act of taking these photographs required a full connection with the land as Keithan waited for the perfect light. Through these photographs, as in all her art, whether painting, photographing, or creating collage, Keithan distills the energy, spirit and beauty of nature.
Keithan grew up in rural Pennsylvania, receiving her MFA and BFA from Pennsylvania State University. She also studied under Robert Morris and Mary Miss at Hunter College in New York City in their Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program. Her achievements include highlights of a 2012 "Artist-In-Residence" award (A.I.R.I.E), a 1981 Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, a Michigan Council for the Arts Grant, multiple solo and group shows including American Painters in Paris Exhibition in Paris, France in 1976. A number of magazine and newspaper articles have been published about her work, as well as television interviews and two fine art photography books, Michigan's Heritage Barns (Michigan State University Press) and Michigan One-Room Schoolhouses (University of Michigan Press). She has taught art at Pennsylvania State University, Juanita College, and elsewhere.
By Mary Desjarlais November 11, 2016
