Musings | Norman Keyes Studio

Why Look at Paintings?

That’s for you to decide.

Another question is, why make them? Well, I would not feel quite whole if I could not paint a canvas.

Painting is language, and this language works best for expressing things that words don’t do as well.

Years ago, I worked with a brilliant art historian at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Driving along Rte. 2, cutting through cow pastures dotted with barns and siloes along the way, we would regularly visit a couple whose collection of paintings by Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and stacks of photographs by Sheeler, Edward Weston and others, would by and large become gifts to the museum.

We talked endlessly about art going back and forth on those trips. He liked to ask big questions, and we’d take shots at answering them. “Why do so many people struggle with or turn away from new art? I think it’s because, at first, it just doesn’t look to them like art,” he would say. And once, in passing, he would remark very casually that “art is about sharing with other people the way in which you see the world.”

I was learning. The banter seemed to hold a lot of truth, and those words would stick with me.

They may be all you need to hear, but it is interesting to know sometimes about the context in which art might be made.

The painting at the top of my home page came out of a moment last summer when, on a massive yellow rock in Maine, a group assembled. It was nearing sunset, and the wispy grasses and caked lichen underfoot assumed a golden glow. For a performance organized by Michael, the sculptor, people living nearby volunteered to help carry out there a large horn that he had carved out of spruce and an imposing animal-bone ladder that he’d made, twelve or so feet tall. It was the “stairway to heaven,” someone joked.

In the breeze floating off the ocean, a handful of people, ages 14 to 70, then united into a spontaneous range of sound and dance. Using moose bones found in the woods that Michael provided, some of us struck notes on the ladder, which doubled as a xylophone.

My wife and I intended only to volunteer in that moment along with everyone else, but, with images in my mind bathed in the lowering sun so luminous over the water, I wasn’t ready to let it all fade as we made our way back to the cottage. The next morning, I made an oil sketch -- and finished the larger painting in late December. It was my last for 2025.

Why mention this? Well, I suspect we all privately hold in common core feelings of being alive and share fleeting moments of connection or sensation in ensemble. Art is many things, and it can take us out of the clatter of everyday matters that consume us. Painting is not a documentary practice for me but it starts with experience and can help to sustain and extend the moment, and then become its own journey...

If anything in these paintings speaks to you, feel free to linger with them and share with others.

I welcome your thoughts, too.

Meanwhile, all the best in art and life.

January 4, 2026

Painting in a Tube

What can you glean from taking a fresh look at an object you made with your hands during an early, formative moment in your life?

I’ve held on to some things I made, including my first fired ceramic, of our pet dog, from children’s classes at the MFA, Boston, and a painting, now in a tube, from 1973 or 74. I’ve also kept paintings from figure classes taken later at the Museum School where models would pose for a couple of sessions and stop before any of mine could be completed (making finished paintings wasn't really the point, of course).

Henry, my first teacher there, once came by my easel, saying: “Norman, I bet you don’t know how to paint a sphere." He challenged me to try, and to my surprise he was right. That was the lesson, understanding what you don't yet know.

At that time the painting studios were not yet in Museum School’s Graham Gund building but rather carved out of a residential block in the Fenway, dark, haunting, and yet full of character. I’d carry those unfinished canvases out to my Chevy Nova, a magnet for parking tickets punctuated in a blaze of red on the windshield. Over the Mass Avenue bridge I'd drive them back to Tufts, getting wet paint all over the seats.

The other day when I unrolled that very early painting from its tube, I could see how little l knew about technique in oil painting before going to art school. Like the later figure paintings, I had never really finished it, in part because it was big.

I was about 17 and recall blocking it out, trying to show that I was really using the studio that I had been given at my secondary school. So I brushed in a man wearing a blue coat and white blouse, smoking a pipe, seated dreamily at a table, an open book before him. I surrounded him with contorted faces and figures stretching to the edges.

And yes I ran out of time, but displayed it anyway in a show at my school, where some people passing through the halls wondered not just what the man in the painting may have been smoking, but who else might have had had something smoldering in a pipe. Some of my classmates were smiling so much about the subject that the chatter must have raised eyebrows, but to the school’s credit, no one in the administration questioned me about it.

Adolescence can be a turbulent time, but truth be told, the main intoxicant was Vincent Van Gogh and a portrait he painted in Auvers of Dr. Gachet, not long before the artist’s demise. I had seen it reproduced in a book.

The pipe-smoking man would eventually hang in a bedroom at my mother’s home, a measure of her love, you might say; it ultimately made its way into attic storage where it was long forgotten. While cleaning out the house after her death in 2013, I saw it, and wondered whether to throw it away. Instead I slid it into a PVC tube and into a U-Haul truck bound for where we live today. Back into storage it went, still unfinished, still in process, and just where it belongs. I'm still wondering what to take away from it.

August 4, 2023

Otium and a Trembling Earth

Driving back through Maine from Grand Manan this summer, my wife and I made our way down to Williamstown, Massachusetts, to experience the luminous Ando-designed building containing the exhibition Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth at the Francine and Stirling Clark. Afterimages of a dramatic coastline rivaling Big Sur lingered in my mind's eye.

I hadn’t seen much by Munch since making a rapid tour around the museums of Oslo with the kids some years before, but I’ve long been drawn to his work. In his paintings, the fjords are much calmer than the water surrounding the island in the Bay of Fundy that we had just left. It’s the earth that shudders, and in Williamstown the show gave us scenes in shimmering sunlight and under a haunting moon, and it contained paintings that I had not observed or noticed before. Thank you, Sebastian Smee, for the steer.

Well, I could ask what you may think about the gender dynamics in Munch’s work today, how or whether they so long endure. Is the moon, so often reflected like a pillar through the water down to the shore, of specifically generative significance or is it enchanting on many levels? Perhaps because of its close focus upon landscape and the natural world at the Clark, the discovery for me was in the enchantment of Munch’s color. I have been playing with ideas of simultaneous contrast, so to encounter The Yellow Log, and the good vibrations of its yellows and purples, was as timely as the theme of deforestation for us all.

Out into the sunshine, and around the grounds, the stroll around the Clark was something of a throwback for me to the Getty, where I worked in the 90s. I had not seen the Clark since before its expansion in 2014, and now I could fully appreciate the setting, there in a verdurous bowl circled by hills, so unlike being perched on a mountaintop in L.A. But the Clark is a destination museum too, and like the Getty the architecture encourages you to meander both indoors and outdoors, offering an opportunity for art and nature to carry your receptive mind off to a rare and ineffable calm.

I am reminded that there is a word for this. Back at the Getty, museum leadership enjoyed saying it, in Latin—otium—which had the uncommon ring of cognoscenti code. Think of being a Roman noble contemplating Phoebus at leisure in your peristyle garden, forgetting that you might be standing in an earthquake zone. They would explain, in meticulously casual style, that this was the program goal they handed to Richard Meier for construction of the new travertine-clad museum. Working there in those days was for most of us a more feverish experience, but this summer, as a visitor to Williamstown in the cool and bucolic Berkshires, you could breathe in the full totality, of the trembling earth and a rare note of otium under a golden sun, and top it off with maple ice cream at the nearby Lickety Splits.

Carpe Diem.

August 5, 2023

Ear Worms in Poetry

Sometimes, it seems rich to let go of words. All to the good that I’m mostly visual now, but a few quotes linger like the gentle music from Mr. Softee‘s ice cream truck, and offer some shape to the day. Let’s call them ear worms in poetry, with apologies for starting out in French.

Que le soleil est beau quand tout frais il se lève,

Comme une explosion nous lançant son bonjour!

--Bienheureux celui-là qui peut avec amour

Saluer son coucher plus glorieux qu’un rêve!

Baudelaire, Fleurs du mal

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, that is success in life.

Pater, The Renaissance

Awake, arise, or be forever fallen

Milton, Paradise Lost

No familiar shapes

Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colors of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

Wordsworth, The Prelude

Sweet are the uses of adversity

Shakespeare, As You Like It

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

Johns

LOOK, MICKEY. I’VE HOOKED A BIG ONE!

Lichtenstein, Look Mickey

This above all: to thine own self be true

(Shakespeare again--Hamlet)

I’m free

Townshend

Already with thee! tender is the night

Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

I am a part of all that I have met

Tennyson, Ulysses

‘Regard the moon,

La lune ne garde aucune rancune

Eliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Ars longa, vita brevis

Hippocrates, Aphorisms