About Vincent Keeling
Vincent Keeling is an Irish artist born in Dublin. He was lucky enough to study under the accomplished painter Brian McCarthy, who offered invaluable training in traditional oil painting techniques. Vincent has exhibited widely in Dublin and around Ireland, showing in, among others, the Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition, Solart Gallery, the Oisin Gallery, The Doorway Gallery, Duke Street Gallery and Combridge Fine Arts. From 2009-2015 Vincent ran his own gallery, The Keeling Gallery, selling both his own work and those of many other well-known Irish artists. With the gallery now closed, Vincent has returned his full energies to his oil painting, and has currently chosen to represent himself online, rather than working through a gallery.
ABOUT THE WORK
I suppose the first thing I should mention about my painting practice is that my artwork doesn’t fall into one neat genre or category. There are many artists I admire whose work is both consistent in subject matter and style, and thus readily recognisable in the public imagination.
And then, there are artists like me, who are sadly cursed, or blessed, depending on your perspective, with somewhat erratic interests, and a peculiar, recurrent desire to experiment stylistically. More on this stylistic trait soon, but for now, let us deal with the issue of my divergent subject matter choices.
It’s really not that bad. It just amounts to four distinct galleries or collections of paintings. We have a portrait gallery, a floral paintings gallery, a Dublin cityscape paintings gallery, and finally a figurative gallery, where some of that pesky experimentation takes place.
Like many artists, I was from an early age attracted to drawing and painting portraits. I think as humans we are instinctively hardwired to find faces endlessly fascinating. And for artists, this is perhaps doubly so. There’s just something special about the transformation of paint into a portrait that seems to breathe the same air as we do. It’s kind of like a form of magic, akin to a magician performing some illusionistic trick that has the whiff of the incredible about it. At least when it goes well, that is.
My own portrait painting experience goes all the way back to some thirty-five years ago when I first started out as a budding artist in my late teens. And I guess from those early days there were two strands to this portrait work. The first, was painting famous face portraits from the worlds of music, movies, and literature. Half as a tribute toward people I admired, and half as a ready means of showing people I could capture a convincing likeness in paint. These days I tend to focus on portrait commission work, and this is mostly personal portraits by people looking to get a family member painted, or sometimes a work colleague. That being said, other people seek me out to paint one of their heroes for them, so an occasional portrait of a Bruce Springsteen or a Leonard Cohen or some such well-known luminary is still part of what makes up my mix of portrait work.
On a completely different note, another collection of paintings that I’d be well known for over the years would be my floral paintings. And I’d say, in particular, my large rose paintings have garnered a lot of attention and some international buyers. Not that I haven’t painted a few small rose canvases as well, but there is always something special about the large canvases; something about what happens when something small is painted at scale. I think part of the magic here is that it helps the viewer to see the rose more like an artist would, with more of the sense of seeing the miraculous in the everyday. Or as a true wordsmith might put it,
“To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower.”
William Blake
Rose and other Floral Paintings
And then we move on to my collection of Dublin Paintings, which is becoming more of a focus for me these days.
I was born in Dublin and indeed have lived here pretty much all my life, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities for taking lots of inspirational photos around the city. Some of the places I’ve painted so far are South William Street, College Green, The Custom House and the Ha’penny Bridge along the famous River Liffey.
And while writing this, I have new Paintings of Trinity College, Fleet Street, O’Connell Street, and Dame Street on the way. If any of this sounds like it might be of interest, you can keep tabs on what I’m up to below.
Now to my figurative paintings, and what I really mean here is paintings focused on the human figure. And within this collection there are two strands worth mentioning: Realistic figurative painting, which are more in keeping with my realist tendencies thus far exhibited, and those influenced by modern art movements that are more experimental in nature.
So, while you’ll see in some of my work a relish in trying to make my figurative paintings as convincing and realistic as possible, others will fly off into semi-abstraction and stylization in a far more playful manner. Of course, this is a spectrum rather than two extremes, but still I do sometimes fear the divergence of styles, and perhaps subject matter, has cost me in terms of easy recognition and the art market’s love of pigeon-holing creatives. That said, no matter what I do, this pesky creative impulse towards experimentation seems determined to rear its troublesome head, so no doubt I’ll continue to periodically embrace a little eclectic eccentricity and hope the muse does not lead me too far astray. We will see.
Figurative Paintings with both realistic and experimental works
Thanks for reading and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the work, and if you fancy hearing more about my new paintings as I finish them, then maybe consider signing up for my Newsletter.
Vincent Keeling
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