(actually, a beach ball). Riff s of color vibrate
throughout the painting. On the side of the
white cloth in shadow, bands of neutral color
run from violet to yellow. Pops of intense yellow
from the top two grapes “rhyme” with the
intensely yellow thumb of the glove. Both areas
visually bounce off the purple sphere to their
left. Th e objects in the painting reach diff erent
levels of resolution; the pinecone and the bell
are lovingly painted and highly resolved while
the grapes exist on the level of notation.
For Kehoe, the process of creating a still
life is intuitive. “I paint objects that fi t in my
hand,” she says, “and I move them around
until I fi nd some relationships of shape, weight,
color, intensity or value that spark a painting
idea.” She is attracted to what Matisse said
about still life: “I don’t paint things, I paint
the diff erence between things.” She might
take days to arrange a setup that still may not
feel completely convincing to her, but that she
recognizes as the best composition she can
achieve at that particular moment. She makes
a commitment to the selection and arrange-
ment of things and the overall composition, but
the setup might change during the course of
painting. If a particular object is not working,
it might be removed and replaced by another.
As Kehoe paints a still life, she is directly con-
cerned with the relationships of the objects and
the overall space of the arrangement. While
she tries to be as specifi c as possible in address-
ing the appearance of things, she also strives to
simplify her subject.
SELF-PORTRAIT: PURE PERCEPTION
In a sense, the self-portraits are a less complex
subject than the still lifes, but the same forces
are at play. A good example is SP with white
shirt (see Portrait as Color and Shape, page 41).
Part of the attraction of self-portraiture
for Kehoe is the availability of her subject.
LEFT TOP: Perhaps Frosty Junior (oil on
panel, 8x6) is a contemporary play on
Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.LEFT BOTTOM: The noir-inspired self-
portrait, Dr. K’s New Hat (oil on panel,
8x6), is composed of facets.RIGHT: Backlit and mysterious, the self-
portrait Orange Jumpsuit (oil on panel,
14x11) emerges from a geometric world.TEXT CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4042 artistsmagazine.com
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