Patrick Whalen Keefe is a Bushwick, Brooklyn-based visual artist, born in 1976 on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He spent roughly a decade practicing figurative watercolor, producing thousands of works, before shifting toward large-scale abstract oil painting influenced by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Franz Kline. Keefe formulates his own oil paint medium from beeswax, damar resin, turpentine, frankincense, myrrh, lavender oil, linseed oil, and safflower oil, giving his curing canvases a distinct scent; he has translated that research into a cosmetic fragrance he calls "Painting." His current work merges observational figuration with gestural abstraction. He has shown at The Other Art Fair and maintains an artist page on Saatchi Art.

My oil paintings have a natural aroma which is very strong when they are curing. They are composed of turpentine, beeswax, damar resin, linseed oil, lavender oil, safflower oil, and pigments. The pigments are mineral and without scent, but the carrier mediums are all organic and each naturally have a uniquely complex scent. The linseed oil becomes rancid as it cures developing a light, pleasant, warm, oily, rotten smell. Damar resin is piney, delicate and floral with a smokey tone similar to mastic and frankincense. The turpentine used to dissolve the damar and the wax is terebinth pine essence, its floral astringent woodsy smell is hot and ephemeral. Beeswax has warm sweet floral honey bready animal notes. When I am painting these aromas saturate my studio. It envelops me and I become it wherever I go. The scent of the studio built over time. As the amount of curing paintings increased in storage the smell of the linseed oils became more prominent against the hotness of the turpentine while I am applying paint. To capture this scent I developed a cosmetic fragrance which I titled Painting. Watercolor has been foundational to my practice. Around 2009 I began regularly attending figure drawing groups in Brooklyn and settled on the Drink and Draw that met Wednesday nights at 3rd Ward. After over a decade of working with this group and over 12000 watercolor drawings I have developed my own unique style of rapid gestural watercolor capture of the human figure. My style uses a mixed media approach with foundational sketching in pencil; watercolor washes to create form; with ink and oil pastel highlights.