Kathleen Keifer

Kathleen Keifer is a California-based internationally collected artist. She is a leading force of the 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. Kathleen’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. Water, sky, and architecture change their appearance with the shifts in weather and light. Her broken brush strokes depict light and color in luminous waves, dissolving form into a shimmering surface of vibrant light. For her, painting captures the very essence of time and its passage. While painting landscapes, Keifer became fascinated with isolating the objects in her paintings. She believes that actual sites and places have an individual magic. The goal is to take objects from popular culture and paint them in a new context. She began to paint the silhouette of the Life Guard Tower more as a pop art symbol than landscape element. Her 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 culture.