EMPTY SPACES UNPEOPLED INTERIORS OPEN IMAGINATIVE WINDOWS AND DOORS

[City Edition]

When Maya Angelou's first marriage began to fray, the author cast about for reasons. She arrived at this: the house.

"After several years of rapturous married life," Angelou writes in her essay, `A House Can Hurt, A Home Can Heal,' "we moved to the Pacific Palisades, into a futuristic condo that thrust its living room out over a California canyon with a daring and an insouciance usually to be found only in a practiced drunk pretending sobriety."

The condo's interior, however, was what really sent the marriage's foundation crumbling. With its soaring white walls and oceans of beige carpet, the interior diminished not only the couple's possessions, but their very existence. They decided to move (though the second house proved even worse: a place where a piano could not stay tuned, all cooking turned inedible, and beds mysteriously collapsed in the middle of the night. The couple soon divorced).

Though some may doubt a house's ability to bust a marriage, interiors do alter our feelings. Color alone can refine our feelings, space can shift our sensibility about who we are, and where we can go from here.

Duane Keiser paints interiors, rooms without people in them. Yet somehow these paintings wind up resembling portraiture. Perhaps we are where we live.

"You can sense a presence in Duane's paintings," said Martha Mabey, author and former gallery owner. Mabey owns Keiser's "Blue Room," a three-walled view of a seemingly empty room. But look closer."You can feel the people who have been there," Mabey said.

Seen together in "Interiors," Keiser's show at the Marsh Gallery at the University of Richmond, the paintings can leave a viewer feeling much like they've just completed a fractured house hunt, spying on absent occupants through their environments.

For Keiser, who is adjunct assistant professor of art at UR, unpeopled rooms open imaginative windows and doors."When I find an interior, I like painting it and finding things I didn't notice before," Keiser said. "There are things I won't see until I start painting it. My intent is that some people will see my paintings and discover those same things."

Among his most striking paintings is a view of a hallway of the Home for Needy Confederate Women, now part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Keiser planted himself at one end of the hall, months after all the ladies had been moved to other quarters, after the workmen had taken the antique furnishings, after the storied place whose architecture resembles the White House was nothing more than a mausoleum to a way of life long past.

The place was empty.

Or so it seemed.

Keiser painted, and painted, and finally the interior surrendered its secrets.

First, he discovered the glow from the green walls, a particular cast of light that reflected from the paint. Then a cable running from each room, connecting them for some reason electronically. Then ghostly footprints appeared on the floor, joining a shred of newspaper, a piece of balled up trash.

Then the larger context emerged.

"There was this light on the door. And I saw this cross, on the door. And above that, another cross of light. I started thinking about the light at the end of the tunnel, the people who almost die and then come back, and talk about seeing the light, going toward the light."

"Cross," measuring 44 by 50 inches, is one of Keiser's larger works. Most are intimate both in size and context. Measuring sometimes just four or five inches across, the paintings expose small portions of rooms - sliver of window pane with vase; slice of an entrance's curving architecture; autumn glimpsed through one section of far glass.

"In some ways, Duane's paintings are accidental still lifes," said Richard Waller, the Marsh's director. "And that's something people can find in their own environments."

Keiser compares his painting method to that of a camera whose shutter is left wide open for extended periods.

"It begins as a white wall," he said. "Then I see a kind of light I hadn't seen before. A shimmering quality. It's no longer a white wall. In fact, it has all these colors. What happens is, a whole galaxy of information opens up from these places when I leave the shutter open. In this tiny space, the universe opens up for me."

IF YOU GO

WHAT: "Interiors: Recent Paintings by Duane Keiser"

WHERE: "Marsh Gallery, University of Richmond

WHEN: Through April 4

INFO: 289-8276

Richmond Times - Dispatch - Richmond, Va.

Author:

Sibella C. Giorello Times-Dispatch Staff Writer

Date:

Mar 21, 1998

Start Page:

E.1

Section:

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Copyright Richmond Newspapers, Incorporated Mar 21, 1998