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Florence Keefe
USA
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"Every face I paint holds a life worth fully honoring."
Florence Keefe's relationship with art did not begin in a classroom or a studio. It began in Paris, in the apartments of her paternal grandparents, where she spent childhood visits surrounded by paintings that she could not yet fully name but could already deeply feel. She studied those works with the quiet intensity of someone who sensed, even then, that she was standing in the presence of something that mattered. What she could not have known at the time was that the paintings surrounding her were not simply decorative objects but artifacts of a family legacy that ran directly through the blood of the Impressionist movement itself.
The Kiss | Acrylic
After receiving a photo taken by a friend in her back yard in Boston, It was very appealing to me but I thought the background needed to be changed. Since we both of us love the ocean why not creating a new background that would be more enjoyable. Thinking of Salvatore Dali with the cooked lobster on a phone, I thought that was more appropriate and at the same time humoristique. It is important for me to have each viewer smile while discovering my art. We all need a moment to relax.
The lineage that shaped Florence's earliest encounters with art is one of the most remarkable in the history of Western painting. Her great-great-grandfather, Paul Durand-Ruel, was the preeminent art dealer of the nineteenth century, the man who championed Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro at a time when the Impressionist movement was still fighting for legitimacy. Her grandmother, Marie Louise Durand-Ruel, was herself a subject painted by both Renoir and Mary Cassatt, placing her literally within the canvases of the movement her family helped sustain. Florence grew up as a direct descendant of this world, and while she may not have grasped its full weight as a child, it quietly calibrated her eye for the rest of her life.
The Imitator | Acrylic
While dining in an Italian restaurant in Dallas, I enjoyed looking at the painting behind my husband. I just thought it would be amusing to have my husband imitating the pause. So, I wrapped a napkin around John’s neck and asked him to look down on the right and not to smile. I knew it would be my next creation,
Again, I want the viewers to pause, relax and smile while they discover my art. It also displays the beauty of winter and summer. Appreciating nature is also a way to relax.
Despite the magnitude of that heritage, Florence's own creative awakening was humble and instinctive. As a very young child she began to draw, finding in that simple act a form of expression that felt natural and consuming from the start. Art classes during her school years deepened the passion, and by the time she completed high school her ambition was clear: she wanted to attend art school. Her family, however, envisioned a different path. The weight of family expectation steered her away from formal artistic training, and Florence chose instead to build a career in the eye care industry, a field that, as it turned out, was far less removed from her artistic nature than it might have seemed.
"Observation was my training long before any studio ever was."
The years Florence spent in eye care were, in their own quiet way, a form of training. Her profession required her to observe with precision, to look carefully at the human face and read what most people overlook. That discipline of attentive seeing became the foundation for her later specialization in portraiture, a genre that demands exactly the kind of sustained, penetrating attention she had spent years developing in a clinical context. The relationship between how she learned to see professionally and how she would later come to paint was not coincidental; it was formative, shaping a gaze that could hold a subject with both care and clarity.
Cyclone of Lights | Acrylic
Inspired by the beautiful landscape of Iceland. The clouds and the light were very powerful and the landscape has a sense of peace and infinity, While creating my new abstract the light from an upper window landed on my canvas and helped me create the “cyclone of Lights. Palette knife is used since I like to be fast and capture the moment.
Water is such an important element in my life. I love to create landscape with a combination of great colors that bring harmony to the painting, Palette knife and layers are used to give a sense of life to the painting. Serenity, calm and the choice of colors will allow the viewer to relax.
Blue-Green Enhancement | Acrylic
Florence arrived in Dallas in 1984 as a single mother, carrying her responsibilities alongside her creative ambitions without allowing either to extinguish the other. She enrolled in art courses at North Lake College, Brookhaven College, and Richland College, moving through pastel, oil, and figure drawing as her practice expanded and deepened. The mentors she encountered during those years left lasting impressions, guiding her technical development and helping her understand that serious artistic growth required both discipline and community. Her habit of visiting museums and galleries throughout Dallas became as consistent as any studio practice, feeding a curiosity about other artists' work that has never diminished.
"Sculpture arrived late in my life, but the moment I worked with my hands in that way, something entirely new opened up inside the process."
"There are women I painted who are no longer here. What I wanted was not to document what happened to them but to give back something of who they were before. A portrait can do that. It can hold a face in a way that refuses to let the worst moment be the only moment. That is why I paint people. Not to record them but to insist on their presence, their particular light, the specific way they occupied the world. Every portrait I make is an argument that this person mattered, and that argument does not expire."
Retirement brought not a slowdown but an intensification. When Florence stepped back from her professional career, her husband had been diagnosed with moderate dementia, and she took on the full weight of his care. Art became the structure that anchored her mornings, a necessary space of concentration and renewal that she protected with deliberate commitment. She enrolled at the Zhen Art Music Institute and returned to figure drawing through work in the studio of Michael O'Keefe, reactivating skills and exploring new directions with the focused energy of someone who had finally given her practice the time and attention it had long deserved. It was also during this period that she began working in sculpture for the first time, completing her first sculptural pieces in early 2026.
A Night Out | Acrylic
This was an amazing non figurative that was created after Florence had done several portraits. She started by choosing her colors and without any goal in mind, she let her mind flow by listening to music while creating her new abstract. A pianist appeared with and abstract piano and therefore she painted some silhouettes dancing. Abstracts are essential to Florence since it allows her to let it go and create without any directions. It gives her a deep sense of contentment and happiness.
The most searching work Florence produced in the early years of her retirement addressed the subject of domestic abuse with a directness that required both courage and compassion. She created a series of portraits dedicated to victims, women whose lives had ended in violence, and whose faces she painted to honor the full humanity that existed before their deaths. These works were exhibited at Michael O'Keefe's art show in 2025, presented not as statements of protest but as acts of witnessing, images that refused to reduce their subjects to their fates and insisted instead on the beauty, individuality, and irreplaceable presence that each woman carried.
A Rosy-Blue Moment | Acrylic
The painting started by choosing some pastel colors and after the background was achieved, I thought it would be appropriate to paint a woman and let each of us imagine her mood and her thinking, As a single mother while Florence arrived to the USA and loving figure drawing, Florence gives a lot of importance to women.
The portrait of Aso O. Tavitian emerged from a different but equally personal impulse. Tavitian, one of the most significant philanthropists of his generation and a devoted collector of portraiture, reminded Florence of her father in the particular quality of his generosity and character. She was drawn to paint him not as a commission but as a tribute, and in doing so created a resonance that felt almost historically fitting. Florence Keefe, a descendant of the Durand-Ruel family whose patriarch had built an international market for the painters Tavitian's collection honored, was now offering her own portrait of the man who had donated that collection to the Clark Art Institute. At the close of 2025, she sent a print to the Institute with the intention of donating the work, completing a circle of cultural stewardship that spanned generations.
Listening to music, Florence wanted to create a smooth background and used her palette knife to create more action while giving a smooth ambiance to her painting. Rhapsody was representing perfectly what the artist was feeling at the time.
Rhapsody | Acrylic
"Art is the one language my hands have always spoken."
Healing Time | Acrylic
Due to the July 4th 2025 Texas flooding where 27 kids lost their life while attending a summer camp, Florence needed to relieve her sadness by creating a non figurative abstract. She used layers of colors, palette knife and finally found some peace as she signed her new creation.
The year 2026 brought Florence's work into new exhibition contexts with increasing visibility. In January, she was invited to show at the Dallas Chocolate Art Show, an appearance that placed her practice within a broader conversation about contemporary art in the city she has called home for over four decades. Shortly after, she was selected by the Domio Online Global International Art Gallery to feature two of her most recent paintings in the Festival exhibition, where her work appeared in the accompanying catalogue alongside artists from around the world. These recognitions confirmed what those closest to her practice had long observed: that Florence's work was operating at a level that extended well beyond local appreciation.
Attending to her husband who was diagnosed with moderate dementia, they both watched a lot of different discovery channels at night where they visited many National parks. Early spring, Florence chose to use her memories and add some very specific spring colors to create her new landscape. Again, smooth background and used of palette knife to give some depth to her painting.
Spring Renewal | Acrylic
Florence Keefe has never been an artist who submits to the limitations of a single medium or a singular subject. Her portfolio moves across portraiture, landscape, and non-figurative abstract painting with the confidence of someone who understands that creative range is not a sign of indecision but of a genuinely expansive visual intelligence. Each area of her practice informs the others, and the common thread running through all of it is her commitment to producing work that generates genuine feeling in the viewer. Joy, recognition, contemplation, and warmth are the registers she works toward, and the breadth of her subjects and approaches reflects a conviction that art, at its most vital, belongs to everyone who encounters it.
Serene Sunrise |Acrylic
Nature is a big part to Florence’s life. Early sunrise is such a precious moment where calm and peace are not disturbed. She usually paint early morning before other duties need to be taking care of. The viewers too can relate to this very precious moment and enjoy the peace that is captivated in this abstract.
"Paris showed me that art could carry an entire world."
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