ARTWORK by Shirley Keller ©2024-2025

 

Georgia’s Hands

Shirley Keller, 2025

Sketching pencils on drawing paper

Darcie, AWE teacher, presented a photo that we are guessing was taken from Georgia O’Keefe’s partner in black and white. Our assignment was to do a timed sketch. 

This is my rendition. It was a very challenging assignment. The hands were staged in the most awkward positions. I barely was able to place the face and hands in some proximation that matched the photo in the time we were given. Over the next week I worked on the sketch, filling in details.

I’d been using a sketch book. Recently, Darcie had shared what sketch books mean to artists, a place to quickly sketch ideas, practice doing parts of what would be whole pieces of art. 

My sketch books all have a few started ideas, but then I’d not work in them again. So I took the one that looked like a book and every assignment Darcie gave us over the past couple of months I used this book as the source. 

My inexperience was very evident when I had skipped a page to do Georgia. Then went back to use the empty page. It was to be a piece done with ink dots. When I went back to work on Georgia after feedback from the next AWE class, I discovered the ink bled through the pages onto the Georgia drawing. Oh my. I was so disappointed. I had done more work on the sketch, fixing proportions, shading, etc. But, all that work now ruined with splotches of ink. I am left with this photo of the incomplete drawing. Live and learn.

The Cottage 

Shirley Keller, 2025

Colored Pencils, Ink and Acrylics

I found a photo in my photo box. The cottage looked so peaceful. I have been wanting to do a piece of art with colored pencils. I ruled out space in the middle of the page. When I completed the drawing, the white empty space begged me to fill it. I grabbed the nearest ink pen and spent the next day or two, making dots. The laced look adds to the peace of the cottage setting. I found an old wooden frame in the shed in a dusty stack of frames. It has ornate corners carved by the frame maker, and I thought a nice compliment to the lace. 

STILL LIFE

Colored pencils and ink

By Shirley Keller, 2025

Darcie O’Brien is my teacher from Arts With Elders. They are a Bay Area organization that sent artists out to elder communities and hospitals to provide art classes to the elders that lived there. 

Covid hit the country. Isolation gradually engulfed us. The artists were asked to leave the properties and not return until the threat of Covid disappeared.

Art With Elders organized Zoom art classes. That meant people like me who lived out of the Bay Area could join the classes. A friend invited me to join her class. That was mid-2020. 

This piece, “Still Life,” was an assignment from Darcie. She emailed the photograph and we were given the choice to do the piece with whatever medium we preferred. As she always does, she gave us the choice of whether we wished to do her assignment. If not, and we had another idea we wanted to pursue, she encouraged us to proceed. 

I cannot speak for other students, but for me, her openness to where each of us were in our art process, each being individuals with different art histories, some never having done art in their lives, to people who began the artist process as wee children and never stopped, made me feel a freedom I’d not experienced. I never once thought of myself as a creative. But her openness eventually changed my thinking. Even raising children it turns out I was very creative, which is why I was successful. And now playing with art I discovered how much I love the creative process. So I embraced the opportunity to do as she suggested, and explored using colored pencils and ink. It was a very satisfying process. And I do love the results. 

NORA

Acrylic

Shirley A. Blair Keller  ©2024

Looking through Facebook I noticed a photograph. It was Nora Lago in Puerto Rico. Leaning against a wall on a stone lined street, one foot up on the wall, and no people as far as you could see. Dark glasses hid her eyes. But she had a smile ear-to-ear. I thought, How happy she looks, relaxed, at home in her parent's birth place. I asked Nora if I could have a copy of the photo to paint. She emailed a copy to me. 

After I painted Nora, I sent her a photo of it. If she liked it my plan was to send the painting to her. She loved it and when she received it she found a beautiful corner to display it and sent me a photo and asked if I approved. Of course, I did.