Brian Keeper is a Texan artist coming to Carmel for a pop-up exhibit this Saturday, Sept. 19 at Austern Cohen Gallery. Viewers get to enjoy his unique acrylics after they survived the Texas Hill Country flood in 2025, when Keeper's home and art were submerged for more than three days under the Guadalupe River.
"I live on the shores of the Guadalupe River," Keeper says. "We had a flood of a lifetime, and then, a year later, we had another flood of a lifetime, after we were promised it wouldn't happen again." Since then, he says, his focus has shifted largely to helping his community rebuild—work he describes as challenging but necessary.
The exhibit Urbanscapes and Abstracts includes 24 of his paintings—lively, poster-like in their attractiveness and burning with unusual colors. The artwork, along with Keeper, will be in Carmel thanks to his friend and promoter Mitch Winick, for an evening of celebration and art. It's a chance to see New York, Las Vegas, Paris and Barcelona through the artist's eyes.
The contents of Keeper's house were largely erased in the flood, but his paintings survived. Winick came to Texas, rescued a batch of the artwork, and took it back to Carmel (where he lives) to clean, frame and arrange for it to be shown.
"I actually picked the pieces myself—there are 24 of them," Keeper says. "I have about a thousand pieces of artwork, maybe more, and those were the ones he decided to clean, frame and exhibit."
Typically working on location, Keeper has five decades of experience painting portraits, landscapes and streetscapes, and specializes in capturing urban environments. He often picks local landmarks, capturing the atmosphere of big cities and offering a new point of view for those who've seen them too many times, immortalizing time and weather.
"My favorite thing is to work on location. I've never been one to sit inside and work," he says. "It's afforded me the chance to travel to many places on the planet, and it's a great icebreaker for meeting people in different cultures. People always expect that I'm a local, so I get invited into people's homes where I'd otherwise be a lonely traveler. Art has just been a great icebreaker."
Before choosing his current home, Keeper spent time living in Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco—a landscape he calls one of his favorites on the planet, and one that shares much of its coastal-mountain character with Carmel.
Not all of the work in the show is landscape. Alongside the paintings that capture weather, wind and movement through Keeper's distinctive use of color are several pieces built around text—more direct, more personal statements.
"When I don't travel and get outside, I turn my focus inward," Keeper says. "Many of them are what I'd call art therapy. I have a bunch of divorce paintings, from different times in my life. Art has always been a refuge, or a place to work something out through words and images."
One of those word pieces, he notes, was his first successful entry into a national show. At the time, he says, a lot of the text-based art on the scene leaned on shock value—four-letter words that, beyond the initial jolt, didn't hold his attention for long. "I thought, well, I'm going to take that as a challenge and try to make something meaningful and pretty—something that would arrest a viewer for longer than 30 seconds."
Asked whether there's a landscape he still hopes to capture, Keeper doesn't hesitate: many, he says.
"Wherever I go, when you start working and slow down, images begin to present themselves—to the right of where you're working, to the left of where you're working."
Some places, he admits, have stopped him before he could start. Crater Lake in southern Oregon was one—a spot so overwhelming in its beauty that he found it difficult to even begin painting. And the physical act of working outdoors doesn't always cooperate with the setting, either. "Sometimes the work may be a beautiful piece, but it wasn't a great experience—maybe I was sore, or the sun was eating me alive," he says. "And then there are pieces I don't think are particularly strong in my portfolio, but the experience of creating them was so great that I adore them anyway."
Brian Keeper: Urbanscapes and Abstracts. Opening reception: 5-7pm Saturday, Sept. 19. Austern Cohen Gallery, 643 Lincoln St., Carmel. austerncohengallery.com.