Earthly inspiration / Artist finds his muse in the mundane

[Final Edition]

Claude Monet had waterlilies. Duane Keiser has a powdered doughnut.

It's average, everyday things that catch the Richmond painter's attention. A bird on an electrical wire. Heads of garlic. An empty street corner.

Keiser, an adjunct art professor at the University of Richmond and Randolph-Macon College in Ashland where he also studied as an undergraduate, has spent a career finding inspiration in the seemingly mundane and uninteresting, from the inside of a darkened closet to a gooey peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

And every day for about the past year, Keiser has turned that inspiration into a painting, usually about the size of a postcard, that's posted daily on his Web log and sold for $100 a pop. It started as a way to do something with his small works that wouldn't be suitable to sell in a gallery, and make oil paintings more accessible to those who can't drop thousands of dollars on his larger paintings.

The blog works began selling so quickly each day that Keiser has moved to an online auction format to allow people more time to vie for his pieces.

Each painting requires about one to three hours. Keiser wakes up every morning not knowing the day's subject. Inspiration can come in the grocery store produce aisle, or at an intersection near his studio in Scott's Addition. "It's not the things, it's the fact that he bothers to give them respect and to look at them; that's what artists are supposed to do anyway," said Ray Berry, a Randolph- Macon art professor who taught Keiser when he was an undergraduate at RMC. "The subject matter is sometimes the trick that gets the paint on the canvas."

Day in and day out, new paintings appear on the blog. Keiser's paints and a laptop come along on vacations. It can be tough to carve out time each day to focus on doing a complete painting, he said, but the daily routine has been good practice in capturing the essence of an object or scene in a short period of time.

"It's kind of like a meditation," he said. "You have to be still in the middle of a hectic day."

Not all of Keiser's pieces are finished so quickly. A new exhibition at Randolph-Macon College's Flippo Gallery consists of about 30 of Keiser's night scenes, including canvases of empty rooms and darkened streets that each took long stretches of patience and observation to complete.

Like a photographer who leaves a shutter open to expose film to more light, Keiser said it can take months of studying a scene to get the right effect, whether it's street lamps glowing in the darkness or a parked car's red brake lights reflecting oncoming headlights.

"I find these things to be fascinating for some reason," Keiser said. "I like the idea of taking something and keeping your shutter open for two months or three months. I like the process of discovering."

INTERESTED?

WHAT: Duane Keiser's "Night Paintings" exhibition

WHERE: Flippo Gallery at Randolph-Macon College

THROUGH: Feb. 12

INFO: (804) 752-3018

DAILY BLOG: http://duanekeiser.blogspot.com/

Contact staff writer Dena Sloan at dsloan@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6860.

ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO

Credit: Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

Richmond Times - Dispatch - Richmond, Va.

Author:

DENA SLOAN

Date:

Jan 8, 2006

Section:

Arts & Entertainment