San Francisco, Girl with Mission Dolores is an original lithograph by Margaret Keane c. 1980. A young girl in a head scarf is seen in front of the Mission Dolores in San Francisco, California on a blue sky day. An original color lithograph limited edition 72/100 and signed in pencil by the artist. In very good condition with artist’s stamp in bottom left corner.
Margaret Keane born Peggy Doris Hawkins on September 15, 1927 in Nashville, Tennessee. When she was two her eardrum was permanently damaged during a mastoid operation. Unable to hear properly she learned to watch the eyes of the person talking to her to understand them. Keane started drawing as a child and at age 10 she took classes at the Watkins Institute in Nashville. Keane painted her first oil painting of two little girls one crying and one laughing when she was 10 years old and gave the drawing to her grandmother. She was well known at the local church for her sketches of angels with big eyes and floppy wings. At age 18 she attended the Traphagen School Of Design in New York City for a year. She began work painting clothing and baby cribs in the 1950s until she finally began a career painting portraits. Early on Margaret began experimenting in Kitsch. She worked in both acrylic and oil-based paints with the subject of her artwork limited to women, children and familiar animals (cats, dogs, horses).
Keane’s paintings are recognizable by the oversized doe-like eyes of her subjects. Keane says she was always interested in the eyes and used to draw them in her school books. She began painting her signature “Keane eyes” when she started painting portraits of children. “Children do have big eyes. When I’m doing a portrait, the eyes are the most expressive part of the face. And they just got bigger and bigger and bigger,” Keane said. Keane focused on the eyes as they show the inner person more. Keane attributes Modigliani’s work as a major influence on the way she has painted women since 1959. Other artists who influenced her use of color, dimension and composition include Van Gogh, Picasso and Klimt. She was named a Fellow of The Society of Western Artists after exhibiting in three Annual Juried Shows in the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Keane’s works are in collections all over the world. Public collections include The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid; The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; Tennessee Fine Arts Museum, Nashville, Tennessee; Brooks Memorial Museum, Memphis, Tennessee; Hawaii State Capitol, Honolulu; The United Nations, New York City ,National Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City; Musee Communal Des Beaux-Arts, Bruges and others. Solo Shows: Galleries in New York, Chicago, Honolulu, Houston, San Francisco and Beverly Hills, The Brussels Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, by special invitation of the Belgian government; Tokyo American Cultural Center in Tokyo, sponsored by the U.S. State Department; National Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, to name a few.
