Kate Keely – The Rainbow Bird Series

In my early life, I lived on a large farm in western Maryland. I grew up surrounded by all kinds domestic and wild plants and animals. Making drawings and paintings that related to this constant interaction with the natural world led me to art and biology degrees in college. I studied sciences such as Ornithology – the study of birds - and thought I was going to be a medical illustrator, but I quickly found that I was not that kind of an artist. My expressionistic style led me to study drawing, painting, and sculpture, and I began to teach while in graduate school.

I loved teaching art history and one of the fascinating things about it is learning all about ancient mythological stories. After recognizing consistent patterns in mythology, it occurred to me that imaginary creatures were profoundly interesting and that I could develop my own mythical tale to serve as a basis for a series of paintings. My own mythic concept became The Rainbow Birds Series and over the past twenty years I have related the story of these creatures.

These birds come from an expanse of intensely bright caverns located deep within the earth. They freely pass through the earthly realm, sometimes apparent to humans as a tiny flash of multicolored light. In mythology, many creatures have an attribute that serves as a flaw or weakness that often shifts to be an advantage in particular circumstances. Rainbow Birds have the unusual characteristic of being blind. Their blindness allows them to travel in areas of intensely bright light. As it follows, one of the roles of Rainbow Birds is to lead children who are passing from this realm into the next.