The resulting images are simple and delicate. “Wrightsville
Beach, NC” captures the layered horizon over the sand and sea.
In dripping applications of yellow, green, purple and blue, with
spherical shapes layered on top of light washes, Keefe Ortiz
depicts a soft beach view. The image is abstracted down to
simple shape and color and appears hazy, as though pictured
through a dream or fading memory.
The piece has literally captured a beach scene’s most basic
elements: colors for sand, water, and sky, and layers in the pic-ture
plane that recall their meeting on the horizon. It also cap-tures
the mood of Wrightsville: relaxed, colorful and welcoming.
Not content with one style or subject, Keefe Ortiz’s approach
to painting allows her to learn things about herself, as well as
share something with the world. Working predominantly in
series, she explores her own feelings and their more universal
implications. In particular, place and time are a shared narrative
in much of her work. This is not surprising given the many dif-ferent
places she has lived and the jobs she has held, including
devoted mom to two boys.
In the “Playground” series, she utilizes the still life genre to
create intimate and lighthearted vignettes of childhood. This
series was initially influenced by her teaching career. Many of
the objects depicted were collected for use in still life setups for
her young students. Keefe Ortiz realized she’d unintentionally
created an ongoing nostalgia-flavored story.
“I have a lot to say, and I didn’t even know that,” she says.
“Every part of it seems to have a narrative in it about time
and place. Before my art education, I was also interested in
anthropology, archaeology and artifacts, what meaning a place
holds, that type of thing. So I think that interest has always
been there.”
Keefe Ortiz poses whimsical artifacts of childhood — story-books,
toys and dolls — in various stages of realism. The colors
are bright, primary and emphatically cheerful, and recall color
schemes from nurseries and kids’ bedroom walls. The facial
expressions of many of the toys are amused, sometimes seem-ing
to smirk at the viewer.
In varying the style, arrangement and context of the fig-ures,
Keefe Ortiz encourages the viewer to read a story in their
progression.
In “Playground,” done in acrylic on canvas, the spirited crea-tures
are depicted with three-dimensional realism and set inside
a comforting powder-blue palette. The scene includes bright
yellow and green spotted giraffes, a small bluebird and a pillowy
white llama in a charming Christmas scarf. None of these char-acters
look directly ahead, but viewers can feel their sideways
stares.
The collected toys also appear in “Hush Little Baby,” abstracted
to simple shapes and colors on top of a darker, dripping water-color
scene, and in “Rainbow” as simple swaths of color on white
paper, coalescing at the center.
www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com
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