Roanoke College resident artist Steve Keene brings an assembly-line mentality to his work -- and passes the savings on to his customers.
New York artist Steve Keene, who has set up a studio in Olin Gallery at Roanoke College’s Olin Hall, creates dozens of paintings simultaneously, which he sells for $1 to $5. Keene says art should be available to everyone.
Keene has created album art, video sets, stage sets and posters for the likes of the Dave Matthews Band.
Steve Keene is painting at Roanoke College's Olin Gallery until Nov. 10, and since he arrived Oct. 26, he has painted more than 500 paintings.
Think real people can't afford real art?
People weren't just buying Keene's paintings. They were buying them by the fistful, by the armload. Broke young twentysomethings, college students, even a 6-year-old named Judah were snatching up paintings by the real, full-time professional New York artist (and sometimes dropping them, too). Other artists were buying Keene's paintings, as well. Artist Suzun Hughes of Roanoke had a stack of them in hand and was looking for more.
Why?
"It's fun," Hughes said.
It's also cheap. How cheap? Let's put it this way: If you're one of those people who hangs posters on walls instead of paintings because the posters only cost $10, it might be time to give Keene a try. His paintings cost $5. And those are the big ones.
The little ones are a buck.
"Anybody can have one," said Keene, resident artist at Roanoke College through Saturday. (His work will be on exhibit at Olin Gallery at the college for a week longer.)
New York artist Steve Keene, who has set up a studio in Olin Gallery at Roanoke College’s Olin Hall, creates dozens of paintings simultaneously, which he sells for $1 to $5. Keene says art should be available to everyone.
Keene has created album art, video sets, stage sets and posters for the likes of the Dave Matthews Band.
Steve Keene is painting at Roanoke College's Olin Gallery until Nov. 10, and since he arrived Oct. 26, he has painted more than 500 paintings.
Think real people can't afford real art?
People weren't just buying Keene's paintings. They were buying them by the fistful, by the armload. Broke young twentysomethings, college students, even a 6-year-old named Judah were snatching up paintings by the real, full-time professional New York artist (and sometimes dropping them, too). Other artists were buying Keene's paintings, as well. Artist Suzun Hughes of Roanoke had a stack of them in hand and was looking for more.
Why?
"It's fun," Hughes said.
It's also cheap. How cheap? Let's put it this way: If you're one of those people who hangs posters on walls instead of paintings because the posters only cost $10, it might be time to give Keene a try. His paintings cost $5. And those are the big ones.
The little ones are a buck.
"Anybody can have one," said Keene, resident artist at Roanoke College through Saturday. (His work will be on exhibit at Olin Gallery at the college for a week longer.)
How does he do it? Think Henry Ford, whose assembly lines brought automobile prices within reach of the common man. Keene is a one-man assembly line. He doesn't paint a picture a month, or a week or an hour. He paints 10 an hour, up to a hundred a day -- day after day.
"I really don't think of these as paintings," he explained, while taking a short break last week. "I think of it as a big sculpture that people are walking in. It's like Hansel and Gretel. You see a gingerbread house, and you take a piece of candy with you."
Fair enough. Walking into the gallery where Keene has set up shop is a little like stepping into a candy jar. Keene's paintings -- there are hundreds, maybe thousands -- are lined up on two long wooden racks that span the gallery. More paintings are propped against the walls. On opening night, adults and students and a few very small children circled Keene's wares at speeds ranging from contemplative to breakneck, sometimes pausing to pluck down paintings from the racks, as Motown music blared from loudspeakers overhead.
Meanwhile, between the racks, in a space marked off by yellow tape (the kind of tape you see at crime scenes that says, "Police line -- do not cross"), Keene worked. Keene paints on pieces of thin plyboard cut into rectangular shapes. On this night there were about 80 of them sitting side by side. Keene moved among them with his brush, making a slash here, a dab there, while half a dozen people sat outside the tape and watched.
Keene did not talk to them. Asked later what people were saying about his show, he said he didn't know.
"I don't interact," said Keene, who puts in 12-hour days painting. "I don't want to talk to people when I'm working."
200,000 sales and counting
Keene was educated at Virginia Commonwealth and Yale universities. Now a married father of two who lives in Brooklyn, he met gallery director Talia Logan when both were living in Charlottesville in the 1990s. Logan quickly became a fan. She estimates she has purchased more than 40 of Keene's paintings (an outlay for art that falls somewhere between the price of an iPod and a new pair of shoes). "They're addictive," Logan said.
According to Keene's Web site, his unusual approach to painting began to develop in the early '90s, when he was friends with many musicians and worked for a while as a disc jockey. Keene has created album art, video sets, stage sets and posters for the likes of the Dave Matthews Band, Soul Coughing and the Silver Jews. His painting borrows a lot from music, in fact, especially the improvisational kinds. Keene, who often literally moves into the gallery where his work is being shown and paints on site, considers his work performance art, and says people who buy his paintings (on the honor system -- there are payment boxes set up around the gallery) are "buying a slice of my time."
Keene has sold a lot of slices. He has done his art act in Philadelphia; Houston; Cologne, Germany; Los Angeles; Melbourne, Australia; London; and Florida, and estimates he has sold 200,000 paintings over the past 15 years.
What does he paint?
Anything and everything. Here are some of labels that appear on his pictures in hastily painted letters: "Hotel Roanoke," "Gertrude Stein," "Purple Rain," "Richmond," "Norfolk," "Virginia Beach," "Baseball," "October," "Rain in Salem" and "Sam's Club." There are pictures of the Beatles and Brooklyn and Athens and lots of flowers.
"Junk," Keene calls them, and "absolute nonsense." The point is to gather up objects, he said, in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg -- who made art from dead animals and bathtubs, among other things -- and assemble them into a collage.
But one man's junk is another man's treasure. Or woman's. And whatever the reason, most of those buying up gobs of paintings at Keene's paintings at his reception were female.
"I just like his whole philosophy about art," said Julie Bivins, a Radford University graduate student whose husband works at Roanoke College. She had come to Olin Hall with friend Denise Valente, a respiratory therapist, and had a stack of dollar-priced "maybe's" in her hands. "I chose this one just for the colors in it. Our walls are kind of bare." Bivins was also eying one titled "Breakfast," with a dashed-off plate of bacon and eggs.
"I like the way a lot of them are funny," Valente said.
And Keene's prices? "Ridiculous and funny," Valente said.
Logan's take on Keene's art was a little different.
"It's absolutely inspiring," the gallery director said.
1 comment:
hum, as they say here, "whatever floats yer boat". Not sure I like his work or the colour palette, but if others do and he is enjoying what he does and is able to support himself, well all the best eh!
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