About

Norman Keyes is a painter who finds, after being in museums for some decades, that all art is contemporary, dead or alive. His new paintings are an immersion into elemental moments and often in response to the times of day, including some nocturnes borne out of evenings spent in Maine cottages off the grid.

As a child, he took studio classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he was early captivated by Copley’s Watson and the Shark, Turner’s painterly response to the transatlantic trade of the enslaved, Monet’s luminous grain stacks and the unusual La Japonaise, and the wonders of what were then called the “Asiatic” collections. He received his BA, MA, and MFA degrees from Tufts University, concluding his studies in 1988 at the Museum School. He has held various positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. He has a studio outside Philadelphia and some room to make things in Maine.