Vincent Keeling's Art Blog

If you’re reading this it means that you’ve happened upon my collection of rose paintings, and indeed all those rose prints that are taken from my original canvases. What I want to do here is to give you some idea of the inspiration behind this work, and to explain why I’ve been drawn to paint so many roses over the years. There are some of the usual reasons, as you might expect. Roses after all have always been steeped in a wonderfully rich history of symbolism around themes of mortality, romance and love, and who doesn’t like a little poetry...

Hi all, I’ve just got one painting to tell you about today. I’ve decided to call it “Solar Rose II” after a painting I did way back in 2009. As ever, for me it’s all about trying to conjure up a luminous quality to the rose. And, in this instance the rose almost seemed to be emitting light itself, reminding me of the sun with it’s warm yellow and orange tones, and thus the title Solar Rose seemed apt. As for the composition, although I am often drawn to the interesting shapes of a tightly cropped arrangement, here I felt...

In my Blog post on 2 February many of you might have seen my oil painting study for The Unfolding Kiss; Both the study and this larger scale work, represent a long term ambition of mine to introduce figures into my floral work in an effort to create something quite new. And with this in mind I am delighted to announce that after many months of painstaking work this full sized painting is now finished, varnished and ready to go out into the world. The idea behind the painting was to marry two of my favourite subjects in oil painting. The first is the...

This painting is called “Lovers by the Ha’penny Bridge”, and for those of you who keep a close eye on my work, you’ll notice that this is a larger version of a small study painting I completed back in 2016. As often is the case I painted the smaller study to work out the colouring and composition on a small scale first.  So what can I say about this larger canvas? The first thing is that it’s an unashamedly romantic painting, where many of the unsightly elements, like garish traffic lights and battered road signs have either been removed or transformed with...