Painting

Nutopia

Don Keene is a product of Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. He has exhibited at the Walter Wickiser Gallery, Lichtundfire Gallery and Synchronicity Space in New York City. His concerns with the human figure are less illustrative than they are metaphoric. His abstract accumulations of paint and form investigate the relationships we have with our bodies. This investigative dialog he orchestrates deals with how and why human experience is confounded by primordial passion and desire within a free society that confuses sensuality, sexual charged imagery, emotive content, feelings of personal tension and self-consciousness, and the role of eroticism and pornography. It is the incongruous nature of this content that, for Keene, is in need of exploration. - William C. Maxwell Maxwell Fine Arts, Peekskill, New York. Don Keene's paintings are bold Expressionistic renditions of a ‘Red Light’ district that lurks in the subconscious. Evading time, place and definition, these vignettes represent a freedom of will from judgment while the colors and lines that portray unabashed passions saturate the composition with frenzied force. - D. Dominick Lombardi