JONATHAN KEETON

My work is a meditation on what I am seeing and on the impulse to honor the natural world; that everything is just so. I also feel that at night our influence wanes and the natural beauty and mystery of things takes over again, so it is landscapes and nocturnes that I am drawn to.

After spending much of my adolescence taking and developing photographs, I picked it up again later when I realized that I wasn’t able to work en plein air for weeks at a time with unchanging light. Now I take photographs while out on extended rambles, and decide later on which images should remain as photographs and which might perhaps work as paintings. I have always liked the delicacy and perhaps the demanding nature of watercolor, and prefer to paint in this medium most of the time, although I've recently begin working in acrylic as well and appreciate the forgiving nature of the medium.

I have many influences and painters whom I admire. I studied under a wonderful Australian artist named Geoffrey Dupree in London, and then afterwards I was inspired by the large oil landscapes of Neil Welliver. I love the fact that the large size tends to draw the viewer into them, and prefer to work large when I am able for that reason. There is a wonderful watercolor painter named Joseph Raffael whose work is always an inspiration to me as well.

I’m lucky to be able to return many years later to my first love, although I am keenly aware of where my art might be had I been working as a full time artist all those years, and am mindfully anxious to make up lost time now.