THE COMPLETE WORKS: About this website

This website has been under construction for some months now - it is already 2025 and over 3 years since I formally declared my cessation of artistic output. The intervening time has served only to reinforce the decision I took then, and my regrets, strangely, are minimal. People ask me what I do with my time now, and I honestly respond that I can’t remember how I had time to paint. The studio that I worked in for 30 years is now a very pleasant home in a part of the city that we find very congenial to live. And when people I meet tell me artists don’t retire, I just tell them I’m living proof they do. They also point to the highly febrile and dangerous turn that the world has taken over recent years, indeed months, which previously I might have looked to and addressed through my work. No doubt I would have been doing that, but with hindsight, there is little transpiring now that I haven’t alluded to over the years that I was producing work, and that work still exists. Twenty years ago, if asked for my suggestions for a more peaceable future, two things would have been top of my list: Divest from fossil fuels, and create a secure state for Palestinians - much else might have followed. Third on this list might have been Don’t trust Putin. Now we have Trump ranting ‘Drill baby drill’, and Gaza and thousands of its occupants have been reduced to ashes. Now, as much as ever, the words of Voltaire ring true: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities'.

However, in the absence of new output, it remains for me to arrange the existing canon in some kind of order, and this is the purpose of the new website: to create an archive, as comprehensive as possible, of all the work I have ever produced, arranged chronologically by year and by exhibition. In a nutshell it is an attempt to curate my past, you could say. I have been enabled in this task by the excellent web designer Paul Sturrock, who has come up with a comprehensive and user friendly design which should allow for easy reference to anyone interested.
This of course is not the complete works, and never can be. It has been a long and painstaking task, is not over yet, and will continue to be a work in progress. Much of the older work appears in poor resolution, or worse, not at all. Some work has long since disappeared to collectors long forgotten, and therefore cannot be reproduced here, and some work still in my keeping has never been properly photographed at all. As time goes by, I will continue to upload images as they get to be photographed, but this will be a slow process. If there are any owners out there of a work by me who do not see it represented on the site, I would of course be grateful if they could send a good (phone) image to me that I can use. And if anyone might be interested in acquiring a work, please feel free to enquire. And last but not least, for any members of the art curatocracy who feel there is a gap in their collection, or a substantial retrospective is long overdue - feel free to reach out.

John Keane

February 2025