Patrick Keenan

Patrick Keenan was born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1961. He grew up in Calgary, where he became interested in art at a very early age under the tutelage of his mother Gwen Hughes, a very well-known clay sculptor. He worked on oil rigs as a roughneck before attending the Alberta College of Art and Design, from which he graduated in 1988. After college, he began creating humorous, low-fired clay sculptures, eventually focusing on detailed figurative works.

Working studiously and relying on careful observation, Keenan's sculptures were amazingly realistic, and yet always maintained an element of humour. He enjoyed portraying odd-ball characters and his interest in music, and especially in the blues, was often expressed in his choice of subjects. These included jazz musicians and blues singers such as bluesman B.B. King and Alberta-based jazz singer Big Miller, who he portrayed in a small bronze. He sometimes created group sculptures for commissioned jobs, collections of friends or families – in one case a group of fifteen people – in all of which he managed to express the humanity and comical friendliness of the sitters. In total, he created over seven hundred individual figures before his premature death of heart arrest in 2010.

Patrick Keenan's sculptures were exhibited extensively in Canada and the US. In addition to numerous private collections, his work is represented in the corporate collections of the Calgary Stampede Board, Western Star Energy Resources, North Canadian Oil, Canadian Superior Energy, among others.