Monica O’Keefe

Monica O’Keefe enjoys using watercolor and acrylic paints to illustrate her perceptions of the Alaskan landscape.She loves to be outdoors, and often plans paintings while she is out hiking, cross-country skiing, beachcombing, or just looking at the scenery.

She sometimes paints outdoors “en plein air”, but mostly takes digital photos and uses those as starting points back at the studio. Her paintings of the Alaskan landscape are intended to convey the feeling of being on a peaceful coastline, or looking out from a mountainside, and she hopes that they will let the viewer remember some similar scene or imagine being in such a place.

The ideas for Monica’s paintings come from the patterns formed by light reflecting on the clouds, forests, flowers, rocks, snow, streams, and sea. Using her photos and imagination, she rearranges compositions, shifts colors, and varies patterns of light and dark to try to record the atmosphere of the place.

She paints by applying many layers of watercolor, gouache, and/or acrylic. She likes that these paints dry quickly, are easy to set up and clean up, and that each layer of paint can add light or shadow along with new colors.

Monica first came to Alaska in the early 1980’s to work as a mineral exploration geologist in remote areas of the state, and her background in geology can still be seen in her love of painting rocks!  After over twenty years in Anchorage, she moved to Juneau in the spring of 2005.

She has been hiking the local trails and finds the Southeastern coastline, forests, muskegs, and mountains all wonderful places to be, and a huge source of inspiration for painting.