Grand Day Out (1961), acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
Lake Summer, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
Bright Futures Circa 1938, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
The Three Besties, acrylic on panel, 24 x 24 inches
Lost Memories
In her current series of paintings, "Lost Memories," artist Tara Keating explores the half-forgotten photos of family and friends. Photos are excavated from bottoms of old boxes in which some of the participants names have been erased, places misremembered, and the uncertainty of the past hangs in the air.
The artist begins her process by sorting through old photos. Starting out with sometimes very small (often only about 2 inches tall), scratched, blurry, sepia-toned or black and white pictures, she selects images by measuring her own response to them. Through the process of imagination, she then works to transform these little treasures into full-sized color dreamscape paintings.
These paintings are an attempt to give their inhabitants an imagined afterlife, “I want them to connect with a modern viewer in a way which might inspire them to insert their own family stories into the images,” says Keating, “this experience is universal, we all have lost memories.”