Shirley Keeble - 2025
Shirley Keeble was born in Hertfordshire and now lives in a country village close to the market town of Hitchin. Shirley has had a life long interest in painting, gardening and flower arranging and in all aspects of nature in the countryside.
Her style is mainly loose and can be a mixture of the imaginary within the reality, sometimes favouring mixed media to achieve the desired result. Shirley is motivated by light and colour and the ethereal beauty of a woodland scene, field of wild flowers or even a vase of fading blooms. She is not formally trained but has attended courses and lecture over the years and was encouraged by her father in her childhood to try oils. She likes to be inspired by the subject and express her immediate response to it. It may be the scent of the flowers, or the peace and calm that she wishes to capture in paint. Or, a ‘dancing’ bunch of wild daisies and poppies in a pot.
Her talent with flower painting was recognised by the Society of Botanical Artists when she was elected for membership in 1986. The exhibitions were first at The Mall Galleries and then the Westminster Gallery. This was then followed by membership of the United Society of Artists in 1988.
She has exhibited with The British Watercolour Society in Ilkley several times and was awarded the silver medal in 1990 for the Britain in Bloom Exhibition and In 1992, the Osbourne Butler award for her flower paintings. The BWS again awarded a ‘Highly Commended’ for her entries in 1994.
The artist has exhibited widely in this country since 1982 and has works in private collections in the U.K., France, USA, Cyprus, Brunei and Saudi Arabia. Her work was exhibited in New York as part of a collection shown by an English patron of flower painting.
Shirley has had many of her flower paintings reproduced and published as greetings cards, calendars and limited edition prints by Royle Cards, The Paperhouse Group, Marks & Spencer and Castlemead Publications.