"Cradle" Painting

Anwen Keeling is a contemporary Australian Figurative Painter "Keeling’s realist paintings capture evocative moments in fictional lives with a reverence for poignancy, innocence and elegance. As an accomplished technician (with both camera and brush), Keeling’s genre of heightened realism reveals an adept skill in truthfully depicting the body in space through the use of linear perspective, velvety colour and tight compositions. Keeling stages her narrative by first photographing and sketching her models in a domestic setting. Each painting’s scene in The Blue Room suite unfolds in the same blue room. The photography is integral to her working process as it captures fleeting moments of light and shadow. Keeling then skillfully employs rich pigments and layers of thin glazes to create her precise paintings. Gillian Serisier aptly states in her 2014 catalogue essay: “Painting with oil on Belgian linen, Keeling is enamoured by the act of painting… she nurtures paint’s ability to describe light through the glowing layers of transparent colour that shimmer with in the rich lead white, umbers and ultramarine of her palette.” (Gillian Serisier, The Blue Room, 2014) Despite her painting’s almost photo-realist quality, Keeling never denies the surface’s painterly quality where by the brushwork and the thin layering of oil and varnish still remain present. The suite of paintings in The Blue Room moves away from evoking a drama reminiscent of Hitchcock and film noir, and focuses on the atmosphere that light and shadow play in transforming the pose of the female nude. Titles, such as Swathe, Enfold and Embrace, suggest the interplay between the light source and the varied poses and angles of the sitter. In Embrace, the strong light through window shutters falls across the model. As the model embraces her legs, the light source mimics this embrace, caressing the sun on her back. An atmosphere of intimacy and vulnerability are captured. As the viewer, we are witness to a private experience, viewing the female in a moment of contemplation, never able to enter the space of the personal. “The work of Anwen Keeling is defined by feminine beauty. It is a world of soft tones, gentle curves and reposed thought. Light plays across a form as a liquid element caressing and defining its own trajectory insensible to pattern and mood. The woman herself: young; beautiful; supple is defined by form.