Keith Haynes
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London-born, Keith Haynes is a contemporary artist whose work is driven by a passion for music and design. Nostalgic and playful, Keith’s work has carved a distinctive niche in Pop Art culture, blending subject and object through his use of the ‘clutter’ of popular culture – button badges, album covers, and vinyl records.
With his love of graphic design, Keith creates work of striking visual acuity, playing with texture, colour and composition to generate an eye-catching aesthetic. Retrospective and yet also forward-looking, Keith has found a delicate way of holding onto our tactile past, refusing the onslaught of digitalisation.
Whether it’s a graphically iconic portrait, a map or song lyric, each piece is created from a material that enhances the subject matter.
In his “Hitsville” map series of works, Keith selects each vinyl record based on the song’s title and the beauty and originality of the record label. Look closely, and you’ll spot the geographical relevance of each record’s positioning, allowing the final piece to become not just a graphic representation but also an evocation of place through sound and music. With this approach the subject is the object, and vice versa.
His work has been exhibited extensively in the UK and overseas and can be found in private collections in Europe, America, Canada, Asia and Australia.
Iconography, and particularly music, has always influenced his work and been the inspiration behind his unique pieces. Often using everyday and found materials, whether he is creating evocative portraiture, works based on iconic phrases or lyrics, or map pieces rendered from original vinyl related to the source destination, his attention to detail and creativity is really what makes him a standout artist.
“Since starting to work in vinyl I’ve come to realise the intensely personal meaning it holds for the viewer; this makes it a very powerful medium to work with. So with our current disconnect to digital, downloadable music I felt it timely to remind ourselves of the physical experience of beautiful, black vinyl.”
