Beautiful Isolation

Kathryn Keller’s intimate renderings are as universal as ever

by

Visual & Performing Arts

It’s difficult to pinpoint what it is about Kathryn Keller’s paintings that so echo the real. Far from photorealist works, her paintings—cozy corners by the fireplace, peeks through doorways, expansive bayous shrouded by oaks and reflected into a passing stream—live very definitely in the realm of the second dimension, and upon a closer look might even be considered in some sense abstract with their wispy, conspicuous brushstrokes. And yet, Keller’s visions possess an inherent quality of materiality, of truth.

Maybe it’s Keller’s clever, perhaps even playful, use of reflection: in tepid bathwater, against the gloss of the dining table or the baby grand.

[Read Publisher James Fox-Smith's Q&A with artist Douglas Bourgeois here.]

Perhaps it is her use of color—shading an entire room with a satsuma gleam you don’t have to be told is not the wallpaper, but instead sunlight pouring through the windowpanes. Maybe it’s Keller’s clever,  even playful, use of reflection: in tepid bathwater, against the gloss of the dining table or the baby grand. It could be the human essences secreted into her anywhere, anytime interiors: blankets crumpled in the corners, books left opened on her ottomans, paintings you can barely make out on every wall, and the January 23, 2017 issue of the New Yorker, with Barry Blitt’s rendering of America’s forty-fifth president in a car smaller than his head, left on a countertop.

But more likely, it is the familiarity emanating from Kathryn Keller’s paintings that gives them life—the sense that I, the viewer, have been here before.

This universality speaks perhaps more deeply to Keller’s ability to evoke a shared experience than it does to her (albeit masterful) representational skills. In a 2017 interview with her daughter, multimedia artist Hannah Timmons, Keller said that she is not motivated by the mission of accurate representation: “When I’m painting the landscape or interiors, it’s because I’m painting where I am. It’s as simple as that for me. Hopefully by capturing the uniqueness of the place, by describing a specific place well, it will begin to resonate and feel universal.”

This universality speaks perhaps more deeply to Keller’s ability to evoke a shared experience than it does to her (albeit masterful) representational skills.

“There is the artist who is conceptually thinking about what they are creating,” explained Keller’s godson David Gunderson Weissman. “Then there is the artist who just creates because they need to do so everyday. Like eating or sleeping, it’s what they need to do. There is no set agenda behind why the create.  Kathryn wakes up and tackles whatever surrounds her,” he said. “She paints, every single day, because she must.”

"Kathryn wakes up and tackles whatever surrounds her,” Weissman said. “She paints, every single day, because she must.”

“Kathryn paints all the time,” said Catherine Pears at the Alexandria Museum of Art, which displayed the artist’s debut exhibition The View From Within in 2017. “She doesn’t fly, takes the train to visit her family members, and she paints on the train. Everywhere, all the time, she paints.”

[Read our profile on artist James Michalopoulos here.]

Always painting from life, Keller’s body of work includes her varied travels. But it most prominently features Inglewood, the 1836 Alexandria farm purchased by her grandfather in 1926, where she spent much of her childhood. Today, Inglewood operates as the largest organic farm in Louisiana, run by Keller’s sister Elisabeth. It also serves as Kathryn’s full-time home these days, and her site of quarantine throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Isolation is a theme that has always been reflected in Keller’s work, with her empty rooms and vast people-less landscapes. Even her portraits, which characteristically capture the essence of specific life, are lonesome.

“She’s always painted this,” said Christy Wood of Lemieux Galleries in New Orleans, which represents Keller’s work. “But now, over the past year, it seems to have taken on more meaning.”

Meditating on the nature of her work in 2020, Keller quoted Orson Wells, who said: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” In a world so vast, she said, how difficult it can be to select a subject. “The pandemic has restricted my movement,” she said. “But what more profoundly confines me are my personal limitations, my handicaps: my fears and anxieties which include a reluctance to leave my nest. These limits make my work unique to me. They form the lens through which I view the reality, the world, that I put to paper and canvas.”

"When I begin a painting, how impossible it seems. How daunting a task. How audacious the attempt. I muster my courage and my patience and begin the adventure."

—Kathryn Keller

In January, LeMieux will show Keller’s first major exhibition in the gallery, titled Beautiful Isolation. The selection of contemplative interiors and quiet landscapes captured in the solitude of 2020 lends a serene, not-quite-lucid memory to a difficult year. And the inhabitable nature of her works is emphasized by the now common experience of isolation, shared by an entire population. Now, we have all been here before. 

Along with this nuanced contemplation of the year’s quiet, Beautiful Isolation features a single corner of drama, of destruction, in Keller’s documentation of the wreckage left behind after Louisiana’s worst hurricane season to date. “Hurricane Laura blew through [Inglewood], and blew trees down and mangled the ones still standing,” Keller said. “At first, I saw only destruction, but as I began to paint, I found a beautiful order in the chaos.” 

Beautiful Isolation opens at LeMieux Galleries on January 9, and will remain on display until February 27, with a virtual opening event to be announced.

See more of Keller's work at kkellerart.com and on her Instagram at @kathryn_keller_art.