Kristine Keheley Bio

Kristine spent her childhood in Europe raised by parents who valued art and travel. Their nurturing encouragement and the early exposure they gave her to fine art and architecture has informed her entire life. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1986, with a double major in Classical Archaeology and Art History. Kristine participated in several Dartmouth academic programs abroad. She studied Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence, and Greek and Roman Archaeology in Greece, Germany, Spain, England, and Turkey. After graduating Kristine was awarded a prestigious archaeological fellowship on a Roman excavation in Mallorca, Spain. She moved to Taos, New Mexico, in 1989 at the age of 24 to focus on painting.

Kristine has had seven solo exhibitions and has participated in juried and group shows in New York, Princeton, Taos, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Laguna Beach. Her paintings are included in the corporate collections of Novo Nordisk and Pennsylvania Power & Light, as well as private collections in many countries.

In addition to her work as a professional fine artist, Kristine has had a successful design career in several fields. For many years she was an architectural mosaic artist creating unique works in homes and businesses. She was one of the artists hired for the specialized painting crew of the House of Blues in Chicago in 1996. Kristine has been formulating and designing cosmetics lines and skincare products for nationally recognized brands in the organic and natural personal care industry since 2000. In 2009 Vapour Organic Beauty, a brand that she co-founded and formulated, was launched with industry praise. In 2010, after one year in the marketplace, Vapour was the proud recipient of an Allure Best of Beauty Award.

Inspired by the emotional power of the sublime and her love of the physicality of paint, Kristine's work is luminous, decadent, and lush. Created with glazes of layer upon layer of transparent oils the ultimate surface is rich with spatial effects, colour experimentation, and internal light. Her work explores time, beauty, memory, and how these relate to the evolution of insight. Travel for visual research and inspiration has been a continuous part of Kristine's artistic process.