Pomp and Ceremony

Second Street Jazz

Artist Tobias Keene now showing at Groundfloor Gallery

by Dale Youngman

Profile of Brit-week featured artist Tobias Keene, showing at Groundfloor Gallery

“Brit Week” is a 5-year old event held in Los Angeles, OC, and San Francisco that celebrates the links between California and jolly old England. Featuring art, music, literature, technology, sports, fashion, food and film, there are multiple events around the city to explore and excite the Anglophile as well as the interested Angeleno. One of the most exciting is the solo art exhibit of internationally acclaimed artist Tobias Keene, a third generation British painter, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England in 1963 at Groundfloor Gallery in downtown Los Angeles.

Currently living and working in Los Angeles, Keene started painting about the same time he started reading. His father and grandfather were both painters, who taught him technique in drawing and painting. He says he had no choice of profession, “I have turpentine running in my veins. I would miss the smell of oil paint and linseed oil. I can't imagine being anything else but a painter.” Keene came to the U.S. in his late 20's – as he found England to be a very depressing place at that time. He says he had met some very nice people from California so headed here with them. He first took a job sweeping floors at a hair salon and rented a room off an 80 year old Philippino woman and went everywhere by bus. But he continued painting, and began working on larger scale pieces.

Keene works in oil and mixed media on canvas, depicting such diverse subjects as the Pope, the Queen, children at play, and farm animals. Although he says he came to LA to escape the traditions of traditional English painting – the dead birds and still-lifes of fruit and flowers -he has now come to embrace that nostalgia, although in his own unique manner. "My work is the subconscious portrayal of childhood memories that are running into an unknown ambiguous future". He recalls old photographs, postcards, newspaper clippings, and other media as inspiration for his figurative paintings, remembering images that tap into his subconscious. This is the key to the emotion that is inherent in his work. He is a precise and detailed figurative painter, but his mixed media works feature multiple layers, splashes of color, and often, wide areas of negative space that leave the subject isolated and vulnerable.

He has exhibited in fine galleries and museums around the world, from Indica Gallery in New York, to Berlin and Beverly Hills, Vancouver and Warwickshire, and one international art event in Sao Paulo, where his entire exhibit was sold out. He has had several solo shows in and around LA, including Rivera and Rivera during last year’s Brit Week events, Bergamot Station and the "Fresh" installation at MOCA Los Angeles. His large scale, multi-dimensional works are collected by celebrities and the loyal cognoscenti, including Robert Downey Jr., the Erteguns, and the Harrod’s Collection among other prominent collectors. His work also hangs in the permanent collection of The Trout Museum of Art in Wisconsin, alongside his Father and Grandfather.

Keene will sometimes take up to a year to complete a piece, but he says, “the conception is instant.” In this exhibit, his newest works explore the meaning behind tradition and ceremony. The paintings suggest something that has been passed through generations and “becomes engrained in the collective consciousness, evoking the familiar through the immediacy of emotions that connect us to these traditions; whether through the grace of children at play, the majesty of animals, or the pomposity of a pope in regal dress.” The scale alone of some pieces demand your attention, with my favorite, ‘The King’s Horse” being a majestic 12’ x 8’. When I suggest that it must be hard to let go of something that one spends so much time and energy on, he explains, “When I finish a piece, it’s like the sadness you feel when you finish reading a great book. You don't want it to end.”

“Pomp and Ceremony” will be on exhibit at Groundfloor Gallery, 433 South Spring Street in downtown LA from May 10 through June 3, and will be open for the Downtown Artwalk on May 12 from 5-10 pm. A closing reception with the artist is scheduled for the evening of June 3rd.

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