As Joe Keiffer describes it, he had always assumed, growing up, that he was bound for a literary life. His mother and his Aunt Faith were both well-established writers in New York. His uncle, John McNulty, was famous for hard-boiled stories in the New Yorker magazine featuring Manhattan’s Third Avenue Saloons.

As a career path, Joe’s road to becoming an artist and specifically a painter of landscapes was somewhat of a circuitous route, coinciding with the purchase of his home on the mountaintop in 1989. For a guy who originally descended from prominent 17th century Narragansett plantation planters, who spent his earliest childhood summers visiting his grandmother and extended family on Rhode Island, the Rip Van Winkle Trail was a long way off. Joe was six years old when his grandmother died and the family moved permanently from New York to Rhode Island. Shortly after their move, however, Joe’s father, the artist Edwin Keiffer, decamped to Rome and Spain with his family in tow, to spend a year abroad before returning to their new home in 1961. At a tender age, young Joe had just been given his first exposure abroad to centuries of glorious art and culture.

Joe took his first formal art class as a senior at Pomfret, a boarding school in Connecticut. He recalls with admiration his art teacher and first supporter, Charles Cole. Shortly after graduating from Pomfret in 1970, he joined his family on a year-long sojourn in Paris where he developed his passion for art. He loved the wide variety of wonderful and obscure art museums he visited, his numerous visits to the Louvre and fondly recalls the Matisse show in Paris that year. At last, Joe finally understood why his father had pursued art as a profession and was so inspired by life abroad.

Joe returned from Paris in 1971 and entered Brandeis University, double majoring in art history and philosophy, after discovering a disappointing selection of studio art courses. He spent the summer attending the New York Studio School, founded by Mercedes Matter, a protége of Hans Hoffman, with a decidedly modernist approach to art. She favored abstraction and encouraged the influences of Giacometti, Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. Joe enrolled again the following summer at the Studio School for figure drawing each morning and figure painting all afternoon. One day, Joe decided to devote some time to the careful rendering of a still life and had the 18th century genre painter, Chardin, in mind. Mercedes Matter, the doctrinaire modernist, viewed his effort and declared with a note of outrage, “…but it’s a billboard!” At that point, Joe realized this academy was decidedly not a good fit. That summer, Joe joined friends in Northampton, MA, for a summer of painting from nature—something for which he was completely unprepared. A seed had been planted.

Shortly thereafter, Joe was approached by a fellow art history student at Brandeis who recommended Sotheby’s intensive academic art program for prospective appraisers and art auction house employees. Joe applied to and was accepted into their training program in London. Here he was taught a succession of styles, relating to and linking a variety of decorative arts; silver, architecture, painting and broader artistic styles. Joe was trained to be a fine arts appraiser and developed his specialty in 18th and 19th century art. Sotheby’s was impressed and Joe was hired as a trainee at Sotheby’s 84th Street office, featuring lower-priced, but quality works of art for sale or auction. While finding that 99% of the items offered to Sotheby’s for auction were worthless and that diplomacy was needed to counsel owners, it was nevertheless an incredible learning experience for Joe in his area of interest. Moreover, throughout the six years that he remained with Sotheby’s, he grew more and more disdainful of what 20th century painting had become. He became convinced that with the advent of modernism, 400 years of carefully accumulated skill and insight had been wantonly discarded over the course of only a few generations.

In 1984, Joe left Sotheby’s and went to work for an affluent individual who had a not-for-profit foundation which owned and loaned museum quality art to public collections around the country. As curator, Joe traveled the world but with intermittent free time, concentrated on his own painting. After four years as curator of the collection, his client’s interests began to shift to sailing (having sponsored two America’s Cup challenges), so Joe moved on.

Back in New York, Joe established his own dealership of works by realist, contemporary painters in a two-story walk-up on Madison Avenue. Visibility was a problem and so was the 1991 recession. He decided that this was as good a time as any to change directions and to try to make a living from sales of his own paintings rather than those of others. He started out small but prolific, selling many paintings very inexpensively, mostly sized 10 x 12 inches. Gradually, he expanded his approach, painting fewer, larger and more complex paintings at slightly higher prices.

At that time, Joe began to show his work in one-person exhibitions at the Garrison Art Center in Garrison, New York, and a selection of galleries in New York City including Capstick-Dale Fine Arts, Alexander Gallery, Sherry French and Hubert. Joe’s career took-off during the 1990’s and continues to build from year to year. His roster of numerous regional and national shows continues to expand and include exhibitions in Santa Fe, NM; Northeast Harbor, ME; Cincinnati, OH, and Providence, RI.

Today, Joe is no stranger on the Mountaintop. He can be spotted on a summer’s day with brush in-hand working from his delightfully rustic porch in Twilight Park overlooking the area’s beloved Kaaterskill Clove. Joe fervently embraces the creative minds of his esteemed predecessors, and it’s not difficult to envision him chatting affably with the likes of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Sanford Gifford, Frederic Church and those unmistakably remarkable men of the Hudson River School. Although far from his boyhood stomping grounds on Rhode Island, Joe has “come home.”

When asked to describe some of the thoughts and feelings he has had from viewing and painting the same scenes as the artists of the Hudson River School, his response was as follows: “The Hudson River artists went to the Catskills motivated by a religious awe of the works of God. I went into the Catskills motivated by awe of the works of the Hudson River painters. I had learned good things from copying older paintings, and I was hoping that by copying their subjects, I would learn what they knew, especially on the technical side. I had a great revelation one day when I was painting some rocks and trees, and I was constantly hampered by the things I was seeing which were not beautiful or graceful but were right in the middle of my study. It dawned on me that my deceased mentors were terrific editors; they were composing from nature, not simply recording it, though that is how it appeared in the finished paintings. Thus I shed my literalism.”

Joe’s artistic goal is to incorporate the signature characteristics of the Hudson River School painters with the brilliant color palette of the Impressionists and their successors. He is fascinated with representing light and its changing effect on the landscape.Joe likes to approach a subject from life, frequently as an oil sketch done outdoors. These sketches are used in the studio to inform larger works or are “tidied up” to become small, finished paintings in their own right. Many of his landscapes can be clustered around his favorite places to paint. In addition to the Mountaintop and the Catskill Region, his frequented haunts include Normandy, Northeast Harbor, ME and his home town, Matunuck, RI.

Joe’s upcoming solo show will take place at the Catskill Mountain Foundation (map)’s Kaaterskill Fine Arts in Hunter, New York, opening Saturday, July 25 from 4 to 7 pm. One particular work featured in this show is titled, “Sunset Over the Catskills,” oil on canvas, 27 x 42 inches. This masterful composition depicts late summer’s golden field in perfect harmony with a farmer’s barn and surrounding trees, silhouetted against the radiant orb illuminating twilight’s palette of atmospheric tonalities. Additional paintings will include “Porch in the Mountains,” “On the Schoharie Creek,” and many other selections in various sizes and price ranges. Please join us to celebrate the opening of Joe Keiffer’s fine works and to toast the man who has brought his talents to our Mountaintop.

The Kaaterskill Fine Arts Gallery is located in Hunter Village Square (map) on Main Street in Hunter. For more information, call the gallery at 518 263 2060 or visit www.catskillmtn.org