Kevin Keaney
— Kevin Keaney, on Edgework
Born in Philadelphia in 1967, Kevin Keaney began painting while living in San Francisco in 1991. He later studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 2000, where he worked closely with Claudia Bernardi (printmaking) and Jeremy Morgan (painting). From 2000–2004 he was active with the San Francisco Print Collective, grounding his practice in collaborative and politically engaged artmaking.
In 2018, Keaney moved to Oakland and maintained a painting studio in an industrial district of West Berkeley. His work often begins with journal writing, later reshaped into poetry, which becomes the foundation for his visual compositions. These texts guide him toward photographs and collages that translate into abstract, mixed-media paintings — a process where word, image, and memory continually cross over.
Today, Keaney works from his Freestone studio in Sonoma’s rural interior. His paintings carry an atmosphere of reverie: cityscapes and dream geographies dissolved into layered surfaces, where lived experience and the unconscious meet.
A book of his art and poetry is in development with Edgework Press.