Tchaikovsky floats through the house, past walls lined with antique muskets and carved animal horns. Delicate vases from the Orient sit atop the mantel of a stone fireplace at least 100 years old. Even Keller and her husband of three months, Graham Ramsey, are studies in contrast.
“She's the intellectual, the poet, the artist,” said Ramsey, 47, who runs the Matthews Ford body shop in Asheville . “I'm more the mechanical guy. We take the two opposites and put them together to make it work.” And it does. Keller, 43, and artist and poet, and Ramsey are melding the rugged and the refined into a happy home/log cabin/ art studio. Keller, who named the studio Bright Clearing at Hemlock, will show it off to the public at an open studio exhibition Friday and Saturday. Once you get past the scent of newly cut wood in the studio, which Ramsey just finished building, the giant, curtainless picture windows that suck in sheaves of sunlight from the property, comes the real treat—Keller's art. Keller finds it hard to categorize her painting style, although she is greatly influenced by impressionist Claude Monet. She said she identifies with the French artist because he loved nature. “I am mesmerized by nature” Keller said. That clearly comes through on canvas. Look at her paintings and become transported to the seaside of Nantucket , a mountaintop in the Himalayas or a storm rolling across the New Zealand coast. “I'm motivated by landscapes. I have this hodgepodge in my head of all the places I walked and hiked through and swam in,” Keller said. “My favorite is to be where the mountains and the sea meet, like New Zealand and California . A lot of my paintings were inspired by Nepal and Kathmandu . It's one of the poorest countries, but it is so rich in color and culture.” And Keller knows of what she paints. She spent the past 20 years traveling and absorbing those landscapes. In 1992, she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro , the highest mountain in Africa , and in 1996 she conquered Aconcagua , at 23,000 feet elevation, the highest peak in South America She called Atlanta her home base while also traveling to Nepal , New Zealand , Russia , Tibet , Japan and Indonesia . Four years ago, she came back to Western North Carolina to be near her father, her hero, who died of cancer in July, and to be in the mountains. “What brought me back is the natural beauty,” Keller said. “Graveyard Fields is peaceful and natural. It's like you're in a high valley with natural water and blueberries that turn red in the fall.” Preparing to paint Keller spends a lot of time with her main muse—the out of doors. To prepare for her daily painting sessions, she works out or runs up to 15 miles in the morning, weaving around the giant hemlocks, across the stream that flows into Reems Creek, taking in the forest sounds, the muted light, the earthy scents. At lunchtime she reads about art and artists, science and scientists. She then turns on Brahms, Claude Debussy or Beethoven, and lets the classical music wash over the studio and seep into her fingertips. It's all a daily, disciplined regimen—exercise, nature, word and music—fuel for the artist's engine, leading up to the afternoon, when Keller puts palette knife to oil and canvas to begin her painting. Then the hard work starts, the swirling and the mixing, the letting out of emotions and stories and colors and memories, often culminating in a painting that's a surprise, even to Keller. “Once I start working on the canvas, what shows up will reveal itself and show me something I hadn't thought of. Not knowing ahead of time is a lot more exciting,” Keller said. “My brain only has a limited ability to see something. If I just let it happen, it's a much more unique and creative process. I find the process fascinating. We only have a limited idea of how complex and naturally creative we are.” People think she paints with a brush, Keller said. But she only uses a palette knife, moving it though the paint, bleeding and blending colors to create natural shapes that move and flow. “I find it's so wonderful,” she said. “You can never learn all there is to know about color. I love experimenting with different colors and the way that paints work together. I'm a color pig.” A budding artist Keller was born in New Orleans and moved with her family, parents Nancy and Dr. Charles Keller, sister, now Michelle Keller Gould, and brothers Scott and Gregory, to Asheville in 1967. She attended the Asheville School , which didn't have an art program but gave her permission to study art on her own. She earned an art history degree from the University of Colorado , then completed a master's of fine arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas , Texas , and also studied at the prestigious Parsons School of Design in New York City . During this time, Keller also studied in Italy and Austria . “I decided I didn't want to be the art historian, I wanted to be the artist,” Keller said. “It took me many years to get the courage to do it.” And now that she has summoned up the courage, Keller is doing it big. Her paintings, some as large as 40 inches by 50 inches, start at about $2,000, indicating just how much effort she puts into each one. “Everybody that sees her work, all ages, really do like it,” Ramsey said. “I didn't know anything about art before I met her. I think her paintings are fantastic. I can understand them and appreciate them completely. She's converted me to an art lover.” |
