Keith Batten at Columbia County Council on the Arts

I first began to conceive the DOORS series about five years ago while exploring abandoned sections of Route #66 in Arizona and New Mexico. The dilapidated houses, abandoned gas stations and decaying billboards all seemed like doorways to another time. Since then I have continued to be inspired by the walls of NYC, with they’re faded painted advertising murals briefly revealed whenever an old building is torn down, or the vacant farms along upstate NY’s “blue highways”. The long ago dramas and lessons revealed in these ruins have stimulated my imagination. I wondered what hidden stories these “doors” had borne witness to? I was attracted to the integrity of the surfaces, damaged and exposed to the elements, with natural patinas impossible to replicate by hand. Therefore, I have used colored pencils to draw on these doors, or rather ” draw out” of these surfaces, new and illuminating undiscovered truths. My experience in the theater has enhanced this way of storytelling so that each door is like a play unto itself, with layers of history and echoes of past lives.

Montreal born and New York based artist Keith Batten studied Visual Art and Theater at Toronto’s York University where he graduated with an Honours Bachelor Of Fine Arts degree. He began his professional art career in NYC back in the early eighties, working as an illustrator doing magazines, greeting cards and book covers. He also did a number of design projects, including Brooklyn Bridges The World at BAM, designing a festival for all three theaters. In the early nineties he advanced to large scale corporate illustration, doing canvases for the Hasbro showrooms in New York and London. At this time, his talent as a theater director began to take over. For ten years he went on to direct large scale musical theater productions literally all over the world for Cameron Macintosh and Disney Theatrical. This theater work afforded him the opportunity to absorb foreign cultures while working intimately with other artists from Seoul to Buenos Aires. After traveling the world intensely for a decade, he has now focused his energies again here in New York where he has spent the past four years creating his DOORS series, drawing with colored pencils on old wooden doors and found objects.