Keenan Staffieri
Permanence Meets Possibility
Color and texture as a place to feel.
Through layered color, texture, and intuitive mark-making, I create paintings that hold the tension between what endures and what transforms. Each piece begins on solid wood panels built to last, then opens into motion through fluid washes and hand-shaped gestures that map the emotional topography of a moment.
My work translates presence into surface. It invites you into a space where the act of seeing becomes an act of sensing—where technical craft converses with raw intuition, and the physical world reveals pathways to the inner one. In this threshold space, art becomes more than observation. It becomes recognition.
Every painting carries this duality: grounded in material, alive with possibility. Built to endure, made to release. It exists in the space between what you see and what you feel, between the known and the becoming.
Studio
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The Artist
I’m a contemporary abstract expressionist painter based in Southern California, working primarily with acrylics, mixed media, and textured pastes on wood panel. Born in 1989, I began painting seriously in 2020, drawn to the way layered color and texture could express what words could not.
My background in Computer Science (BS, University of Redlands, 2011) shapes how I approach each painting like a living system: layered, iterative, constantly evolving. I work increasingly with my hands rather than brushes, guiding paint’s motion more intimately and reserving traditional tools only for specific textures or directional marks. Through scraping, layering, and rebuilding, texture and hue become a language until the painting shifts from describing something to becoming it.
I paint based on what I feel and often what I hear when I close my eyes. The sensation of sound and the animated static of inner vision find their way into color and form. My aim is to create paintings that are experienced, not just viewed. Surfaces that translate presence into matter, inviting you to notice the bridge between what you see and what you sense.
Say Hello
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