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In 1949 Mr. Keeling was born into a British family in Jamaica, West Indies.  At the age of eight years he was awarded Honours in Drawing, and at eleven, a First Prize in Drawing by the Royal Drawing Society, Bloomsbury, London.  "a talent for art which is inborn and of a higher order…asserts itself for the most part in early youth"  G.W.F. Hegel.

 

At thirteen Mr. Keeling went to Stowe School, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Buckingham in England.  He spent holidays with his aunt and uncle, a portrait artist and Herald of the Lord Lyon's Court in Edinburgh, Scotland.  In 1973 Mr. Keeling earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Liberal Arts from Washington and Lee University in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  Upon graduation he won First Prize in Drawing.

 

Mr. Keeling did not attended art school.

 

"In all the schools, one is taught to do something in art; this is a vast mistake; one merely learns to execute, but truly to create art: never!"  Camille Pissarro.

 

"We may all descend from Pissarro; he was lucky enough to be born in the West Indies; there he learned drawing without masters."  Paul Cézanne.

In 1974 Mr. Keeling returned to the West Indies.  He worked on the Corn Islands of Nicaragua, and helped to manage his family's farm in Jamaica.  In these years he began to seek the way of God.  In 1977 he married, and moved to Minnesota, U.S.A. where the following year his daughter, Lorna, was born.  The family settled near Oxford, Maryland, where Mr. Keeling worked as a boatwright.

 

In a foreign country, soon separated from his wife and daughter, Mr. Keeling earned a small income from occasional labour and sales of his artwork.  He found success by publishing editions of prints for colleges.  In 1985 he earned his Master of International Management (MIM) degree at the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird), Phoenix, Arizona.

 

Following heavy promotional costs and poor sales of his prints to the alumni of a large University, Mr. Keeling was financially ruined in 1989.  The following year he began working in Washington, DC, to promote trade between the Caribbean and the U.S.A.  Without a home, salary, or financial assets, Mr. Keeling was unjustly jailed in Virginia for being unable to pay sufficient child-support.

 

The Holy Word of God and the writing of our great modern thinkers provided Mr. Keeling with solace during these years of loss.  His art became expressionistic, as he illuminated the vision of our Christian faith with his own technique.

"Professional schools produce an hypocrisy of art precisely akin to that hypocrisy of religion which is produced by theological colleges for training priests, pastors, and religious teachers generally.  As it is impossible in a school to train a man to make a religious teacher of him, so it is impossible to teach a man to become an artist." Leo Tolstoy.

Mr. Keeling's art is a bridge from this world.  It appears through a mist, a mirror, beyond seeing, to the depths of Being and the soul.  It is a gift, not his own to discard at will, ...a trust, unearned, not teachable to others.  Mr. Keeling does not try to shock the public.  He seeks instead to please the Eternal, and so ease his melancholy.  He would be glad if another soul should see his artistic vision and be encouraged to face life with more hope.

 

"An artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others.  He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas."  Georges Rouault.

 

Mr. Keeling seeks the ineffable, to be transported in awe, dumbstruck; the unspeakable appears and he is speechless.  At such times words are unnecessary, trivial; he is humbled, silenced. So be patient reader; words are often weak and unable to express the inner life of vision.  

 

Please do not judge these paintings sternly.  They seek a realm where the unseen appears, where the unutterable is heard, the end and the beginning.