Londoner Keith Lane obtained a degree in Fine Art in 1980 while also working as an architectural draftsman. He migrated to Sydney in 1989 and moved to Deloraine in 2014.
He practiced as a Building Designer alongside his practice as a painter/sculptor/printmaker and Visual Arts Teacher at TAFE in Sydney. He has had numerous group and solo shows in London, Sydney, Canberra, Launceston and Hobart, and is represented in private and public collections in numerous countries.
Lane’s experience as a draughtsman is apparent in the remarkable drawing that underpins his work. Whether it is the archetypal patterns that decorate people’s skin to the feathers of an eagle’s wing the artist’s mark is elegant and detailed.
Influences in his earlier work in Australia, particularly the use of symbol are from Asian art and he has exhibited and travelled in China.
Lanes last two shows with Nolan Gallery explore the zeitgeist through the Australian landscape. Phoenix Rising, at the end of Covid times, sprang from the artists experience caught at Canberra airport after significant fires. After rain the skies cleared and the water bomber helicopters headed home. This became a powerful metaphor for recovery and rebirth out of difficult times.
Light, a 2023 exhibition, is a revisiting of the English Romantic landscape painters whose work Lane viewed in his lunchtimes in London at the National Gallery. J. M. W. Turner in particular, with his grand paintings of the Italian alps, is an inspiration for an artist who now lives in Deloraine, so close to Tasmania’s sublime landscape.
Like Turner Lane is a painter of light and the potent symbols of the lighthouse in the storm, the eagle in its’ element and the mist transforming the world offer an optimistic vision for today akin to Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire a painting that marked the end of the Napoleonic wars.
