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The Manhattan Users Guide
New York, New York
April 2009
Tom Keough
Familiar but strange, beautiful but forlorn, peaceful or foreboding (depending on your frame of mind) Brooklyn-based Tom Keough's oil paintings of New York at night – dynamic contrasts of shadows and light – have almost no people in them. If you do see a person, they're sure to be alone, probably seen only from the back and trudging through the snow. In that sense, he out-Hoppers Hopper.
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The Villager,
New York, New York
May 2009
Scott Stiffler
NIGHT PAINTINGS
For nearly twenty years, NYC resident Tom Keough has focused on painting urban and country landscapes set in the hours after sundown. “Tom Keough: Night Paintings” is an exhibition of his recent works.
Focusing on quiet NYC settings, Keough’s ominous yet melancholy vision of urban alienation will seem both familiar and strange to anyone who calls this densely populated city home. Mysteriously empty streets, dark alleys and overlooked corners are transformed by the effects of man-made light and heaven-sent snow. Frozen in time and devoid of activity, they convey a sense of solitude normally achieved only in empty movie backlot visions of Gotham.
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The Gettysburg Review
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Winter 2007
Shannon Egan
Bright Lights on Quiet Streets:
Tom Keough’s Nocturnes
The well-kept city streets lined with trees and old brownstones may seem familiar
in the paintings of Brooklyn-based artist Tom Keough, but the neighborhood is
disquietingly empty. Keough situates the sidewalk in the immediate foreground
of his paintings and compels the viewer to enter into an eerily vacant scene. With
few exceptions, Keough leaves the always still and sometimes snowy New York
setting largely unoccupied. Nonetheless, Keough conveys human presence in his
paintings with the soft glow of lamplight from windows, footprints in the snow,
and cars parked along the side. The theme of urban alienation—a paradoxical
sense of loneliness felt in the midst of dense population and bustling activity—has
been examined by Keough’s art-historical predecessors, such as Edouard Manet,
Edgar Degas, and perhaps most consistently by Edward Hopper. Whereas these
painters frequently employed various urban types (shop girls, entertainers, o≈ce
clerks) lost in thought to evoke a sense of estrangement and inward reflection,
Keough remarkably conveys similarly absorptive emotional states without such
figural intervention.
Although the cityscapes appear abandoned, the viewer expects and possibly
desires to find someone turning a corner or standing in a window. The footprints
in January Night (2003) lead the viewer to such a figure. Small and almost ghostly,
a little girl stands quietly next to a tree in the far background of the painting. The
light cast by the streetlamp is impossibly intense and sets the girl in silhouette.
The bright warmth of this artificial glow contrasts with the cold snow and mid-
night blue of the sky above. One envisions walking toward the girl in a calm that is
antithetical to the usual cacophony of the city. Keough depicts the few hours after
a recent snowfall, when neighbors stay warm indoors, before the roads have been
plowed and the sidewalks shoveled, and nature momentarily overcomes the hur-
ried hum of the city. The steady drone of the streetlamp and the crunching of
snow implied by the footprints are the only interruptions to the sublime stillness
in the painting.
Keough’s painting Sycamore Tree (2005) again examines a markedly absent
street, and one continues anxiously to search along stoops and behind trees for
other inhabitants. Following the diagonal lines of the sidewalk and the fence in
Sycamore Tree, the viewer’s eye finally arrives at another shadowy figure standing
in a glowing doorway. Here, too, Keough interrupts the darkness of night with
the harsh, artificial illumination of the streetlamp. Although Keough places the
lamppost directly in the center of his composition, the source of light in Sycamore
Tree comes dramatically from outside the painting. A city’s glut of artificial light
prevents the night from becoming dark, and Keough takes care to distinguish the
subtle lamplight from within from the brazen fluorescence of the outside. The
navy sky, however, seeps stubbornly through the top edges of the buildings and
branches. The gnarled tree trunk in the foreground of the painting, lit harshly by
this neighboring streetlamp, leans ominously to the right and casts a shadow that
interrupts the viewer’s stroll along the sidewalk.
The presence of long shadows at night is not the only unnatural element, as the
streetlamp in Sycamore Tree, enveloped by leaves from the neighboring trees, also
appears to be a stylized and pseudo-organic tree trunk. Keough’s paintings do not
necessarily evoke a disconcerting tension between natural and man-made land-
scapes; rather they assert a precariously symbiotic relationship among natural
and architectural elements in older urban neighborhoods. Keough draws formal
parallels between vertical trees and lampposts, but the calligraphic branches also
resist the order of the geometric facades of buildings in paintings such as 11th
Street, 29 (2001) and Webster Place Tree (1998). And, in Sycamore Tree the place-
ment of the tree in the foreground functions as a kind of liminal space between
the natural and man-made, as flowers mediate the rectilinear grid of the sidewalk
and the irregular, gnarled bark of the trunk.
Keough’s paintings most noticeably recall Hopper’s in their evocation of a
pensive urban narrative as well as in their careful study of the e√ects of artificial
light along almost abandoned streets. Keough’s paintings are not simply city-
scapes, but are careful meditations on unlikely and infrequent moments of soli-
tariness and quiet in otherwise crowded neighborhoods. Hopper similarly cap-
tured this preternatural calm of an urban street in Early Sunday Morning (1930).
Where Hopper o√ered a careful study of morning sunlight raking across the
building facades, Keough attends to a more complicated study of the e√ects of
light—both natural and artificial, as well as from interior and exterior sources—in
his paintings. Ultimately, Keough paradoxically and successfully paints seemingly
uncanny nocturnes of a quotidian neighborhood that is at once familiar and
strange, inhabited and isolated.
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Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn
Brooklyn, New York
December 2006
Hugh Crawford
Tom Keough does masterful paintings of Park Slope at night. They are stirringly beautiful.
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Brooklyn Daily Eagle
April, 2008
Two art exhibits in the Brooklyn Public Library’s Grand Lobby until June 14 pay homage to familiar Brooklyn scenes with an intriguing use of light and a focus on the relationship between the city and its trees. South Slope resident and painter Tom Keough imparts a sense of tranquility and solitude with his series “Brooklyn Nights,” set in unusual late evening light.