Attempting the Mambo Painting

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. Domick Lombardi Don Keene is a product of Pasadena's Art Center College of Design and the graduate program in Studio Art at The College of New Rochelle. 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. The investigative dialogue he orchestrates deals with how and why human experience is confounded by primordial passion and desire within a free society that confuses sensuality, sexually 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. The resultant paintings and drawings on canvas and paper are purportedly abstract yet feel sexual. - William C. Maxwell