Brian Keeler is known as a colorist, as the quality of his color, combined with the expression of light, are essential aspects of his paintings. His art also combines a unique sense of composition, proportional harmonies and draftsmanship, as his work shows an orchestration of overall relationships. There is a unique sense of place in his canvases, as he portrays the area where he lives and the destinations of various trips with his appreciation for history, landscape and topography.

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Brian combines these aesthetics of light and structural dynamics in his work and in his teaching and writing, as he shares his love for painting in workshops in the United States and abroad. He has organized and instructed figure painting and plein air landscape classes in Italy. During these Italian sojourns and study, he became a passionate student of the Italian Renaissance through more than 30 years of teaching and travel in Italy.

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Brian is the son of a Sunday painter and newspaper editor, the late William W. Keeler, whom he credits with sparking his initial interest in art. He received his early training at a small art school in southern Pennsylvania, The York Academy of Arts. Prior to that, he studied art while attending Keystone College near Scranton, Pennsylvania. He has also attended workshops with many prominent realist painters over the years, including Nelson Shanks, Daniel Greene, Albert Handell, Lennart Anderson, Everett Raymond Kinstler and Michael Bergt.

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His paintings have appeared in American Artist magazine, Artists Magazine, and American Art Collector. He has received numerous awards over a long and productive career. Many private, business, corporate and museum collectors have acquired his paintings. Brian has shown at many established galleries for decades, including the West End Gallery in Corning, New York; the Laura Craig Gallery in Scranton, Pennsylvania; the MainStreet Galleries in Kingston, Pennsylvania; the Rodger LaPelle Galleries, the FAN Gallery and the Newman Gallery, all in Philadelphia; the Argosy Gallery in Bar Harbor, Maine; and the Titus Gallery and North Star Art Gallery, both in Ithaca, New York.

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Retrospective exhibits of Brian’s work were held at two prominent museums in the Northeast: the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, hosted a father-and-son exhibit in 2004, and the Roberson Museum in Binghamton, New York, presented a major show of 95 of Brian’s works in 2016–17.

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In 2022, Brian founded a plein air and music festival, the Susquehanna Summer Solstice Fest at French Azilum, a historic site in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. He has served as the artistic director of the event since its inception. He has participated in and won awards at several national plein air events, including in Easton, Maryland; Wayne, Pennsylvania; and the Cape Ann Plein Air event in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

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Brian has an active YouTube channel where he shares videos of his work and a Facebook page where he posts his latest paintings. Writing about art and many other subjects—movie reviews, exhibits, museum shows, travel, books, the environment, and politics—is also part of his work, in essays for his blog on the North Star Art Gallery website (northstarartgallery.com).

 

When he isn’t painting, you may find him playing guitar in his gypsy swing combo, Zingology—together since 2012. In conjunction with the band’s gigs, he also teaches several forms of dance, including Lindy, Balboa, West Coast Swing, Salsa and Foxtrot.