Galleries across the state are showing video work, mixed media pieces, fiber arts and painting.
Moss Galleries Portland
“Richard Keen: Downeast with Love,” through Dec. 5, 100 Fore St., Suite B, Portland. 207-804-0459, elizabethmossgalleries.com
OK, this one doesn’t end in October, but while you’re up…
There’s often been something about Richard Keen’s paintings that have been problematic for me. It’s had partly to do with the way the uber-simplified forms and DayGlo colors flirt with abstraction but stay, in my experience of them, safely on the side of representation. Their flatness — everything pushed right up against the picture plane — their graphic quality, and a brief (unfortunate) tryst with spray glitter have in the past come off as more decorative than, as the title of the show indicates, deeply connected to a landscape that is purportedly meaningful for Keen.
Richard Keen, “Blue Trees No. 29 (Blue Hill),” 2026, acrylic and oil on canvas. (Image courtesy of Moss Galleries)
But this is changing in very encouraging ways. I still view the artist’s “Blue Trees” paintings in this exhibition, along with works like “Purple Trees No. 14” through my old lens. Especially in a show about Maine landscape painting, Keen’s typical visual language can feel contradictory in that it seems to deracinate those landscapes of place; though we know it is supposed to be Maine, they felt like they could be anywhere. By loosening up the angular geometries and flatness in works such as two “Rockweed” paintings, “Asters and Rocks” and “Union River Bay,” something comes alive in them — an organic fluidity that evokes coastal topographies that are constantly shifting, ebbing and flowing.
Were it not for our knowledge of the centrality of Keen’s love of the Maine landscapes, we might take “Rockweed No. 17” as pure abstraction sans content. And it would be a good abstraction. While this might seem to counter the above comment about deracinating place, the effect is to actually transmit the sense of the ever-morphing movement and mutability of the aquatic plant of the title and the conditions in which it exists. It gets at a more essential truth of his subject and the particularity of its locale.
Richard Keen,”Purple Trees No. 14,” 2026, acrylic and oil on canvas. (image courtesy of Moss Galleries)
This feels like an exciting development and a huge leap forward. “Rockweed No. 20” and “Asters and Rocks” convey site-specificity in ways that “Purple Trees No. 14,” rigidly locked in its one-point perspective, does not. Organic form goes a long way toward transmitting the ephemerality of currents, weather patterns, light effects and so on that we experience in our state. This looseness also softens the stubborn insistence of Keen’s contrived geometries, which are valuable only up to a point when you are trying to convey nature. It would be different if his earlier work explored the fractals of nature, but that oeuvre felt more like an arbitrary geometry imposed upon nature.
Also welcome is a more complex compositional impulse that adds depth to the paintings, defying the former flatness, especially in works such as “Flat Rock No. 4 (Dresden)” and “Green Trees No. 2 (Surry).” Gone in these paintings is that sense of the entire phenomena as occurring front and center — nothing before it or behind it. Instead, we can travel into and out of these works, rather than merely spectating.
There are other experiments here that feel inchoate, such as “Supermoon Horse Dreams” and “Strawberry Horse Moon.” These seem to be striving a little too hard for something mythic. But that’s OK. The most salient fact is that Keen is clearly breaking free from self-imposed parameters that might have felt fresh at one time but were no longer serving him. Liberation is always cause for celebration in my book.
Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland and can be reached at [email protected]. This column is free to access through support by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.