Keith Donovan’s amazing new work is now on view at Galerie 727 in Montmorillon, France.
More about Keith below.
Rue de la Republique
Montmorillon, France
Keith Donovan is a Canadian born artist living in France.
“After some years of study, practice and travel I moved to a small village in central France, about three hours from Paris. Here, the street lights go out at 10 pm every evening, the nights are very dark, starry or moonlit. In the summer there are glow worms, frogs and crickets; in the winter, three kinds of owls.
I found an old, dirty, torn copy of Benjamin Rabier’s Gedeon Mecano, from the 1920’s. He was a pioneer comic book artist, overshadowed later by Hergé who made Tintin famous. Rabier shows a real humanity with his work, a tenderness that made the idea of tearing up his work to make mine was difficult. But kids had drawn and scribbled in this copy; it was a rich mess. So after a few years, I made a dozen or so collages.“
Keith Donovan was born in Edmonton Alberta. He graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design with a diploma in 1975 and received a certificate for post graduate work from the Ecole Superieure d’Art Visuel in Geneva in 1985. Since the early 1980’s Donovan has exhibited extensively in international exhibitions.
Over the past 3 decades he has lived and worked in Europe, exploring the relationship between printing, collage and painting. Describing his work Donovan states that his “interest is in questioning the logical order of procedure in painting. That’s how I begin my attempt to change perceived space, to see if I can make it new.”
Donovan’s paintings frequently draw content from his collages. The collages are made using material from widely differing sources: Bambi, medieval Chinese woodcuts, the drawings of Bruegel or Soviet-era coloring books. Sometimes one or several of these collages are used as drawings for paintings. They lend their content to a process which is in fact a form of one-off printing that resembles the “suicide” woodcut technique.
Other paintings are made using an opaque projector, creating the work by projecting and painting fragments, one at a time, directly onto the canvas.
His work is about spatial and temporal impermanence, it seems itself to be caught in the middle of a process of transformation. He writes, “What makes painting exciting is it’s unwillingness to sit still, if it’s good it can be reinvented with every new viewing.”
You can follow Keith on Instagram and on his website.
And you can find edition prints on Peat and Repeat’s website: Keith Donovan
UPCOMING: Essays and Interviews
Part II of Interview with Elke Luyten.
Interview with Anna Sang Park on her trilogy The Cho Stories
Interview with Coder/Herbologist/Film Ace, Artist and Poet, Meredith Finkelstein
Essay on the work of Francine Hunter McGivern by Carter Ratcliffe
PEAT and REPEAT BOOK SERIES:
Peat and Repeat is excited to announce that we are creating an artist book series that will include programming and workshop endeavors. We are launching a fundraising initiative for this series. More on this soon.
We really do rely on tax-deductible donations to keep going! The more we can fundraise the more projects in the community we can produce and our intention is to expand our community outreach.
Caterina Verde’s, Mole Mansions will be the first to emerge from this series. Expected due date December 2024
I love these!