Bears Love Picnics

Harold Emerson Keeler

"Bears Love Picnics" is a color lithograph that Keeler printed while he was working in Denver. With a nod to Marin, Feininger, and cubism he composes a dynamic abstracted Colorado landscape. An abstracted bear wanders into a campsite, surprising the campers as they picnic.

This image represents a transformational time for Keeler, who began his career in graphic design and developed a stylized modernist sensibility that focused on landscapes, architecture, and scenes of historic industry. By the late 1940s, he had relocated to Seattle and the influence of non-representational artists piqued his interest. Here, he has begun to pick apart the still, determinate lines of what he was used to and, in focusing on the energy of the subject instead, bestowing on them a new 'life'.

Colorado-born printmaker Harold Keeler worked in the Colorado WPA after studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. During the 1930s he also worked as a Master Printer in Denver and was employed by the Denver Art Museum as a Print Researcher, focusing on Albrecht Durer's woodcuts.

In 1942 he moved to Seattle, Washington. Keeler was one of the first printmakers to work at Tamarind Lithographic Workshop, Los Angeles in 1961, working as a printer-fellow between August of 1961 and February of 1962.