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arts & culture
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KANSAN.COM | THURSDAY, SEPT. 1, 2016
Aries
(March 21-April 19)
Complete old projects and begin a new phase in your work with this Virgo eclipse.
Maintain healthy lifestyle practices for balance. Aim for higher levels and launch
Taurus
your next endeavor.
(April 20-May 20)
Expect some emotion. Begin a six-month family, fun and passion phase, with this New Moon lunar eclipse in Leo. A romantic relationship transforms. It's all for love.
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(May 21-June 20)
One domestic phase closes as another begins with this New Moon eclipse in Leo.
Adapt your home to suit.
Be patient with a resister.
Family comes first.
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Carefully choose your words before presenting. Creativity reaches new levels over this lunar eclipse's six-month cycle. You're especially persuasive. Expand your networks. Adapt communications to a new story.
Leo
(July 23-Aug.22) A new financial prc
A new material phase dawns. Surpass old barriers in your relationship with money over the next six months under this New Moon solar eclipse. Strengthen hands.
Strengthen bonds.
Virgo
Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)
(Aug. 23-Sept. 22)
Begin a new personal phase, with this New Moon solar eclipse in your sign.
Take charge to fulfill what you see possible. Keep your word. Grow and develop your capacities
Libra
(Sept. 23-Oct. 22)
Insights, breakthroughs and revelations percolate over your next six-month solar eclipse phase. Consider the past. Begin a new philosophical, spiritual and mindful phase. Get clear about what you want.
about what you want.
Hannah Edelman/KANSAN
Scorpio
(Oct. 23-Nov. 21) Begin a new phase in friend ship, social networks and community, with this New Moon solar eclipse in Virgo. Take a group endeavor to a new level over the next six months.
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(Nov. 22-Dec. 21)
Complete old work and begin a new six-month phase in your career and profession, with this Virgo eclipse. Take advantage of a ripe opportunity and assume
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Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)
Go out and explore. Embark on a new stage in your education, travels and investigation, with this Virgo New Moon solar eclipse. Study from a master. Share your
Aquarius
my finances reach new levels over the next six months, with this New Moon eclipse. Discover new possibilities, and shift directions. Together you're more powerful. Align your priorities for
Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb.18) Family finances reach ne
new circumstances.
Pisces
(Feb. 19-March 20)
Begin a new phase in your relationship. Realign your collaboration to new priorities, with this Virgo eclipse.
Support each to rising heights
over the next six months
Artist Maggie Keenan discusses the artists that have inspired her, including her mother. Keenan spent last semester working on a six-foot self-portrait.
Art in Focus: Maggie Keenan, painter
▶ OMAR SANCHEZ
@OhMvSanchez
on the second floor of a colonial-style Kansas City, Kan. home, a towering figure above the end of a staircase stares down at all who pass it.
It is a six-foot depiction of a young woman, situated atop a coffee-colored living room chair.
Maggie Keenan, a junior studying visual arts and English, imagined, constructed and painted this figure: a six by four-foot self-portrait made with Windsor Newton oil paint.
"Just the idea of rendering one's self," Keenan said. "When you spend a whole semester looking at yourself, it just makes you think about what your emotions are and why you have that expression."
The self-portrait was part of a semester-long class project Keenan had last spring, requiring approximately 120 hours of intricate attention to detail.
"[It was like] doing your friend's makeup at night," she said. "Like blush, mascara, eyeliner, I was adding that to a painting. It became very personal to me and it was like my own little
prize."
The self-portrait which she likens to having a dress-up doll to play with now hangs in her family home. It is an accomplishment her family, composed of her parents and three older brothers, are proud of.
"I love seeing what projects she is working on from her different classes," Lori, Maggie's mother and 1983 University alumna, said. "I enjoy having her ask my opinion on her paintings and also when she gives me advice on mine."
When you
spend a whole semester looking at yourself, it just makes you think about what your emotions are and why you have that expression."
As a visual artist herself, Lori describes Maggie's interest in the arts as part nature, part nurture. Painting, specifically, is a passion that Maggie's paternal great-grandmother took a
Maggie Keenan Visual arts student
part in as well.
While artistry has been a part of Maggie's life since birth, visual arts as a focus and potential career did not come to her until high school.
At Notre Dame de Sion, all-girls high school in Kansas City, Mo., she had the option to take a "Fundamentals of Drawing" class her freshman year. She knew she could do better, so she expressed her desire to take the portfolio class — a sophomore level art course — as a freshman.
After reviewing sketches she drew in her free time, the school agreed to move her up.
Quickly, Keenan's ability and vision made her stick out. She said that she was contracted during her summers in high school to draw and paint pieces based on personal photos — especially, pets — by those who had heard of her name and work. Before her senior year, she had already completed the highest level of art class the school offered.
So, what was there left to do for Sion but create a whole new course for her?
"Poor Mrs. Blasdel,"
Keenan said about the art
teacher who created a new
class based on her fast
track, which she took her senior year. The class, advanced placement drawing, is still offered at the school Keenan said.
Linda Blasdel is still a visual arts teacher for the school. Today, she remembers Keenan's time at Sion fondly. She said having someone of Keenan's caliber was an enjoyable experience and considers her a friend to this day.
"What I have seen in Maggie is a passion for art-making and a growth mindset where she knows the more she works the better she gets," Blasdel said. "She was a delightful student and the student every art teacher hopes to have in class."
After high school, Keenan has used her experiences as an artist to thematically focus on painting people.
"I'm so captivated with other people's lives," she said. "Like at an airport. You see people greeting each other at their gates, and you just kind of wonder what their backstories are."
At airports, coffee shops and even in the classroom, Keenan is known to spontaneously take out a sketchbook and attempt to tell a story of a person's mental
and emotional state with a quick drawing. For her, it's an exploration that fascinates her and is something she wants to do for future projects.
Now, after her first two years at the University, Keenan's art has already taken her to a spring workshop in London — where she met one of her inspirations, figurative painter Ann Gale — and a summer workshop in Civita, Italy in 2015, to name a few. This summer, she taught 7-to-12-year-olds the basics of ceramic art at the Belger Arts Center in Kansas City, Mo.
But, if you asked Keenan to pick the highlight of her summer, it would be coming back to her family home after finals.
"Where's the painting?"
Keenan asked her mother.
"Go upstairs," her mother responded.
And there, above the end of the staircase on the second floor, hung Keenan's self-portrait.
"Every time someone goes upstairs in our house now I have to warn them, there is a person up there, don't be frightened," Keenan said. "It's just a painting."
Keenan's self-portrait in production
Contributed Photo/KANSAN
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