Jim O’Keeffe, Artist, Newcastle, Co Wicklow.

Jim O’Keeffe comes to fine art after a long career in corporate communications, branding, and design. Over the years, working with everything from visual identity to theatre and television design, he has built a deep connection to composition, colour, symbolism, and the language of images.

Jim's art practice rests on two pillars. One side leans into minimalist abstraction: gilded surfaces, careful colour rhythms, and a kind of quiet that asks you to slow down and really look. The other side holds onto traditional iconography, especially the narrative of Byzantine and early Christian images, treating the act of painting as something contemplative, almost devotional.

Instead of keeping these worlds apart, he brings them into conversation: abstraction talks with narrative-making; reduction sits next to symbolism; the clean clarity of modernism stands alongside the ancient weight of tradition. Materials matter here. He uses gilding, natural pigments, and old-school techniques, weaving together the tactile realism of the present with echoes of the past.

Even as his communications background shapes his process -giving it a kind of intention and order - there’s a strong pull toward slowness, presence, and the emotional charge of the materials he uses. Through egg tempera painting and gilding, he wants to create spaces for quiet, places for reflection that touch both today’s visual culture and much older spiritual traditions.