Colleen O'Keefe is an Irish figurative painter based near Sitges, Spain. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art Painting from Limerick School of Art & Design and an MSc in Creative Digital Media from Technological University Dublin, before spending over a decade working in the corporate world. Returning to painting has meant bringing everything that time gave her back to the canvas.

Her work explores the human figure in moments of stillness, vulnerability and quiet self-awareness. She is drawn to beauty as a serious subject, and to paintings that reward looking.

Colleen works across acrylic, watercolour and gouache, moving between large scale canvas work and intimate pieces on paper. Her practice is intuitive and layered direct in its making, considered in its intent.

The female nude is a subject she returns to often. Not the idealised or the provocative, but the ordinary, the real, the unguarded. She is interested in the body as it actually is, and in reclaiming that as something worth celebrating. So many of us carry shame about how we look. She wants to make work that quietly dismantles that. Every body painted honestly is an act of refusal.

Commissions are a natural extension of this. There is something profound about having your own figure painted seen, held, made beautiful on its own terms.

Get in touch with questions, commissions or collaborations via colleenokeefestudio@gmail.com