Keith Donovan

Keith Donovan was born in 1952 in Edmonton Alberta. He graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design with a diploma in 1975 and received a certificate for post graduate work from the Ecole Superieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva in 1985. Since the early 1980's Donovan has exhibited extensively in international exhibitions.

Over the past 3 decades he has lived and worked in Europe, exploring the relationship between printing, collage and painting. Describing his work Donovan states that his “interest is in questioning the logical order of procedure in painting. That's how I begin my attempt to change perceived space, to see if I can make it new."

Donovan's paintings frequently draw content from his collages. The collages are made using material from widely differing sources: Bambi, medieval Chinese woodcuts, the drawings of Bruegel or Soviet-era coloring books. Sometimes one or several of these collages are used as drawings for paintings. They lend their content to a process which is in fact a form of one-off printing that resembles the “suicide" woodcut technique.

Other paintings are made using an opaque projector, creating the work by projecting and painting fragments, one at a time, directly onto the canvas.

His work is about spatial and temporal impermanence, it seems itself to be caught in the middle of a process of transformation. He writes, “What makes painting exciting is it's unwillingness to sit still, if it's good it will be reinvented with every new viewing."