Costa Brava, Spain

• Title Costa Brava, Spain
• Category Drawing
• Medium Lithograph Crayon
• Medium Pacific Northwest (subject or artist), Human Figure
• Dimensions 13.75"h x 9.75"w
• Framed Dimensions 22.5"h x 18.5"w
• Year Completed 1967
• Description Herman was Alta Phipps’ teacher in oils in the 1906's and 70's. This sketch was among the 800 on-the-spot sketches completed by Keys during a 9-month, 10,000 mile European driving tour. He gave them to Alta, and a note she wrote indicated that “he made them in Spain.” Alta also noted “Herman was asked to paint at the ‘Prada’ in Spain. Quite an honor.
• Notes Herman Keys, born towards the tail end of WWI in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1918, was a social realist painter and teacher based in Spokane Washington. Growing up, he was considered a musical prodigy by his teachers playing violin with the Portland Symphony and working as a studio musician on Hollywood movie lots. His career in the musical arts changed to visual forms after he found out that he had tuberculosis in his lungs in the early 1940s during a draft induction physical which made playing violin painful. He began his visual art journey studying at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the Art Students League in New York where he studied under influential social realist artists George Grosz (1893-1959) and Reginal Marsh (1898-1954). He opened a studio and soon had private students and from 1953-1970 he taught classes at Whitworth College. As described by one of his Whitworth students Kirishian, Keys “taught the person, not the group,” and believed that in painting “It was the joy of doing—not so much the end product as the process,” as Don Ealy (another former student) states. In his art, Keys states, “my thematic material is social-commentary based on the pitiable environmental circumstances into which children are thrust and entrapped in cities whose marginal living patterns debase and thus destroy countless thousands of helpless young.” Keys experimented in the fields of abstraction, impressionism, and was well known for his efforts in the Avant Garde scene, and later in realistic interpretations. In the 1960s Keys and his wife took a 9-month, 10,000 mile European driving tour where Keys sketched 800 on-the-spot pieces capturing the everyday life of the subjects, recording the “old” European scene that was fast disappearing due to the advances of modern technology. Some of his Sketches from his trip and more artworks can be found in the Whitworth Collection. Keys Died in Spokane, Washington in 1994.
• Artist Herman Keys American Adjunct Professor of Art (1953-1970) 1918-1994
• Credit Gift of Polly Phipps in honor of Alta C. Phipps
• Location Westminster WLC Hallway
• Accession Number 2018.0296
• Status Checked Out
• Administration Admin View
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