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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 is a Northern California painter and sculptor whose work has been shown nationwide. Keyes was born on August 17, 1969 in Tacoma, Washington, as the son of artists Barbara Minas and David Keyes. Josh earned a bachelor's degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master's degree in painting and printmaking from Yale University. His work has been published in numerous publications, and exhibited in galleries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and New York.
Still life
During his early development and student years, the artist went through different periods of characteristic painting styles. The still life period of Keyes lasted from about 1992 to 1997. It is characterized by the use of dramatic lighting and chariscuro underlining the melancholic style of his subjects – taxidermy deer heads, bottles, and discarded and displaced objects. His painting style during these years is reminiscent of Baroque painting, especially Vermeer and Caravaggio.
He was accepted to Yale's graduate painting program in 1997. During Keyes’ time at Yale his style moved away from the still life paintings and he began to experiment with numerous ideas and techniques. The rumor among the faculty was that Keyes had eight different painters working in his studio at once.
Cross section
While at Yale, Keyes met artist and printmaker Lisa Ericson. After graduating from Yale, they moved to Oakland California in 1998. There he met many other emerging and established artists and embraced the evolving Bay Area art scene.
Though often steeped in satire, Josh's drawings and paintings are also
suffused with a sincere admiration of our planet. His altered
landscapes reveal both the intricacy of the earth as a system and the
complexity of our response to the natural world, while retaining a
sense of specificity and intimacy.
Inspired by the works of Paul Cezanne, minimalism, cubism, and scientific and textbook illustrations, Keyes developed his cross section style. In cross section, subjects are reduced to basic geometrical shapes and reveal hidden layers through the dissection of form. In the paintings that have cross sections of water, the blue period, several views of an object or animal are shown simultaneously from a different perspective in one picture. The primary theme and subject of this work addresses environmental awareness and climate change. Treadmill is a strong example of Keyes’ synthesis of the cross section style with the recognition of mankind’s degradation to the quality of life on our planet.
"Treadmill"
24"x30", acrylic on canvas, 2006
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