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"Few contemporary artists portray animals with the empathy of Josh Keyes. At once meticulous and fantastic, poignant and absurd, Keyes' carefully crafted drawings and paintings depict animals isolated dramatically in fragments of their natural environment, overrun with shards of man-made artifice and debris. Seemingly lost and stranded in their dreamlike stage sets, they look like characters in some existential drama written by a modern-day environmentalist Samuel Beckett."
- George Melrod, Art Ltd West Coast Art and Design
Biography
Josh Keyes was born in 1969 in Tacoma Washington. Keyes graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later received his MFA in painting from Yale University. Josh’s work brings to mind the detail and complexity of natural history dioramas, and the color and diagrammatic complexity one might find in cross section illustrations from a vintage science textbook. His work has developed over the past years into an iconic and complex personal vocabulary of imagery that creates a mysterious and sometimes unsettling juxtaposition between the natural world and the man made landscape. The work conveys an anxious vision of what the world might be like in the future as a result of current global warming predictions. Keyes’ interest in creating paintings that fuse realism with the possible often evokes the imagery found in dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature, while other works express the optimism and utopian ideas found in the writings of Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri. Keyes often incorporates objects and animals into his dissected environments that have personal iconographic significance. He weaves his personal mythology through fractured and isolated landscapes that are either overgrown with vegetation or underwater, and often depict historic or military monuments covered with graffiti. The imagery functions as a way for Keyes to express his personal experience and also allows him to comment and interpret events in the world. His work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited in galleries in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver. Keyes currently lives and works in Oakland California.
Excerpt from an Interview with Syed Syahrul 2008
When I first saw artworks by American artist Josh Keyes I was attracted to his composition style that fuses urban everyday items with nature. It was an awkwardly perfect match. Many of them featured animals in a surrealist environment and unlikely pairing, bold and beautifully executed. Thank you Josh for answering these questions.
Q. It seems that all your paintings are mix between urban and nature. What are the messages that you like to convey?
A. Environmental awareness and the common space we share with different cultures and organisms, is the backbone that supports the different themes and ideas I explore in my work. It is in places in the world where the human touch encroaches on the natural environment are of great interest to me. Areas where rain forests collide with the logging industry or the fracture in our own back yards where a sidewalk or street ends and an ecosystem or biome emerges. Areas where cement meets rugged soil and grass, or a displaced bear roams far from their natural habitat. It is in the ever-growing human fingerprint that calls into question the value and importance or lack thereof that we assign to the natural surroundings.
Some studies have found that the planets human population is continuing to rise at a steady rate and is predicted by some to reach 9.3 billion by 2050. This brings up many questions such as could the earths resources sustain such a large population? Like a hungry amoeba the human race is expanding and overflowing into what were once sustainable and healthy ecosystems. This also includes the shrinking gap between different peoples and cultures that tend to cause competition for agricultural land use and other resources, leading to global instability. An example of this friction is a recent incident that occurred in the rain forest borderlands of Peru and Brazil where oil company exploration has encroached upon an isolated and unknown Amazon tribe. These are complex and challenging issues I use as a springboard for creating work. My hope is to create work that blends mythic and archetypal imagery with factual scientific realism that lead to a rise in consciousness in terms of our relationship to the world.
Q. How did you managed to develop your own distinct style?
A. My early years were governed by a strong conviction of painting strictly from life. There has always been for me a certain magic and mystery tied to realist painting. Running parallel to this belief in painting was a personal desire to bring an element of social and political commentary to the work. My student years at the Chicago Art Institute were spent wandering through the museum and experimenting with numerous styles of painting. By my senior year I had settled in the figure-painting department. After graduating from the Chicago Art Institute, I spent four years working on elaborate still life paintings that incorporated dramatic theatrical lighting and were overflowing with personal and cryptic tableaus. Some of the key influences at that time were Vermeer, Caravaggio, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Jerome Witkin, Joel Peter Witkin, Samuel Beckett, and the films of Peter Greenway.
Eventually I decided to go to graduate school, and was very fortunate to be accepted to Yale. The graduate program at Yale shocked me out of my comfort zone. My belief system was challenged and the environment pressured me to make drastic changes in my work. I made a point after graduating from Yale to turn my focus inward; I spent a long time looking and thinking about my early work, and began to slowly take it apart. I began to edit anything that was not necessary. There was a desire in me to recreate my vision from scratch. I wanted to depict objects as if seeing and thinking about them for the first time.
I reacquainted myself with the critical writings of Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard, Palo Soleri, and Buckminster Fuller. Other influences include the ideas and writing of H.G.
Wells, J.G. Ballard, Mragaret Atwood, and many other authors dealing
with dystopian themes. One book in particular that had a strong and lasting effect on my thinking was Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring. I knew that I wanted to create images that contain a personal interpretation of current and historical world events, but I also wanted an element of abstraction and surrealism in the work. I felt that the scientific model often found in old science textbooks hinted at the visual and emotional quality that I was looking for. This way of thinking and depicting ecological systems and objects was an ideal solution for crystallizing my vision.
Q. A majority of you works contain images of animals, I assume that you must love the outdoors.
A. I do love the outdoors, and when I have a rare break from my painting schedule, I try to get in a bike ride or go for a hike. Some of the imagery and things I see during these outings ends up in my paintings. I also visit zoos and parks where I spend time watching animals and birds scurry and flutter about.
Q. To date, among your artworks, which one was the hardest to produce?
A. Since each painting is different and brings with it a set of unique challenges, it is hard to say which one is the hardest to produce. Sometimes the smallest painting can become staggeringly complex in terms of process or working through the concept. As my work continues to grow and change over time, it has become easier in some ways to tackle the work. For instance, after painting a thousand blades of grass with a tiny brush, you learn easier and more efficient ways to paint them. I think that my recent work has been the most challenging to produce. The reason for this is that I have come to demand more from the work in terms of complexity, both in the concept and execution of the work.
Q. Where do you get your inspiration from?
A. The fundamental core of my inspiration is a combination of interests that I have had since childhood. My curiosity and admiration of the biodiversity and complexity of the natural world has if anything increased over the years. Reading Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring many years ago also helped to shape my ideas. This has been mirrored with my concern for their protection and sustainability. These concerns have led me to investigate a wide variety of topics that weave through current environmental issues, ethics, global politics, and try to make sense of a fractured and distorted account of world history and events. In terms of personal style, I have always been attracted to the visual display and interpretation of information. I have a fascination with the scientific or objective view of the world, the way in which it seems to fetishize animate and inanimate things in the world. The way it separates the observer from the observed. It is this separation that interests me. I personally believe that this way of seeing and thinking about the world is the root cause to many of the problems and issues that we are faced with today.
Q. How long does it usually take for you to come up with the idea or concept for a certain artwork?
A. The idea or concept that evolves into a painting or sculpture can happen in a moment, or over many years of thinking and pondering. Something Mel Bochner, artist and critic, told our critical issues class at Yale was, "Artists get some of their best ideas when they are not working." I think there is a lot of truth in this. Sometimes when I am trying too hard to come up with an idea nothing happens, then, while walking through the produce at a farmer's market I will be struck as if by a lightning bolt with a clear idea for a painting or sculpture. Another element is timing. Some of the ideas I have are sitting in the pages of my sketchbook waiting for a specific technical development in the way something is rendered like water, or I need more clarity and objectivity of an idea.
Q. Do you usually finish a painting in one session or do you do several projects at once?
A. I usually work on one painting at a time. If I had a larger studio space my working habits might change, but I have a sense that even if my workspace were larger, I would still gravitate to working on one piece at a time. The exception to this is when I am working on a sculpture then I move back and forth between painting and sculpting.
Q. Who are some of the artists that you look up to today?
A. There are too many to name, what I am responding to these days is what I see on numerous websites and publications worldwide that are dedicated to giving emerging artists a voice. A few artists who catch my attention at the moment are Cai Guo-Qiang, Brian Jungen, Walton Ford, Reuben Margolin, Alexis Anne Mackenzie, Gregory Euclide, and Robert Hardgrave.
Q. People are now shifting from traditional to digital art and create artwork with software such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Are we going to see you shifting to that direction anytime, soon?
A. I have never been too computer savvy and I like to get dirty, so it may be some time before my work and vision gets sucked entirely into vector space. I think that it is interesting to be creating work that looks like it was created by a computer program. I occasionally have the feeling as if I am a dinosaur that is about to become extinct. Though I must admit, I think it would be exciting to work on a project with someone who was skilled with computer rendering and animation.
Q. Have you done any exhibition in any Asian country?
A. I have not but would be open to the idea if the right opportunity came along.
Q. What are your future plans?
A. I have a solo show lined up with the David B. Smith Gallery in late May of 2009, and there are plans to release a book of my work in the not too distant future.
Q. Thank you. Do you have any advice for young artists reading this interview?
A. My advice to young or emerging artists would be to pay attention to the ideas that interest you and to focus on your passion, and believe in it, no matter what anyone tells you. There is always a mist of self-doubt that lingers in the studio, or is there at the start of each new painting, and tells you that you can't do it or it's not good enough, or you are not good enough, or it's already been done, or what's the point in painting anything at all. It is important and crucial to leave this critical voice outside the studio door. One thing Sam Messer, an instructor I had at Yale, told me in a critique was that if you feel embarrassed by a painting you have just made, it is probably because it is sincere work, put your trust in that work. Last, and most difficult, try to be patient and work hard. Know your strengths and identify areas that you need to work on and then work on them. It is also important to define for yourself what success means to you, part of that feeling of success should be making the work that interests and engages you, even if it is not considered hip cool or popular.
Life is and hopefully will be long, your work will and should go through many transformations in the same way your life changes. If you get stuck and don't know how to breathe life into your work, start with either something familiar that you know inside and out, or do the complete opposite and do something outside of your comfort zone. I did this when I was stuck, I packed up all of my "fine art supplies" and spent four months working with non-art materials, it was like being a child again. It was both therapeutic and opened my eyes to all the embedded lessons and rules I had learned in school. I wanted to unlearn and find out what I belived in. Some artists feed on turbulence and collisions others need balance and harmony some are in the the middle, find out what your temperament is and work with it. There are so many crucial world events and changes going on right now, it is an ideal time to be an artist working in any medium. I strongly believe that our responsibility as artists is to find a way of translating these complex events and ideas into poetry and iconic expression that will give meaning to the chaos in the world, even if the message is that chaos is all there is and we embrace it with passion.
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