‘A twist of good fortune’: Sandra Keely’s carved acrylic paintings on view in Half Moon Bay

And it blew her far and wide before she landed in the Bay Area.

Raised in Dublin, she left school at 15 and apprenticed as a seamstress, a fate she didn’t relish. So she took a chance on a nanny job in New Jersey, where her employers pushed her to finish school and enter college.

Many jobs after college, she landed on her feet in Arizona with a plum position as an animation cel illustrator for Don Bluth Studio. Bluth had left Disney and was setting up a rival operation. Keely passed a drawing test given to her “because I had painted stables for my father,” she joked. She worked on movies such as “Anastasia” and “All Dogs Go to Heaven.”  

Earning her chops as an artist, her murals still stand in Phoenix.

Art wasn’t paying the rent, so she waitressed and found other work. Today she runs an office for an architectural firm, leaving her free time to explore artistically. Landscapes, still lifes and more. She painted impressionistically and sketched humorously.

During the COVID pandemic, shut in like the rest of us, Keely decided to try something different from the traditional paintings she had been doing, and settled on linoleum cut printing. By sheer luck (that word again) her process led her to painting latex and acrylic layers over the rubber, and she liked the look of the layered edges. When she cut into them to make a print pattern, she was mesmerized by how the cutouts themselves looked.

Think of this as a highly sophisticated version of the scratch-off painting many do as kids. Only in this case she overlays between 60 to 120 varied coats of paint, maybe half an inch thick or more, then digs right in to form three-dimensional designs.

“They’re tactile, you can touch them,” as she encourages running your hands over the results.

And they are deep, in both senses of the word.

“Daydream in Yellow” is a garden fantasia with a lot of blue showing through the cadmium yellow surface. Those are the very colors that Monet painted the walls in his house in Giverny, beside his own gardens. There’s a resonance here.

“Lillies III” is a pond full of wavy cutouts, again having a distinct pattern reminiscent of the pond surfaces of Monet’s waterlilies.

Birds appear Mexican folk art-style in “Talk to the Wing” and “Duet.”

Some of her paintings have metallic paints, either over the surface or in the deeper layers, such as the silvery “Autumn Fields.”

“If I find a ‘gem’ of color, I’m looking for that as I’m carving,” she said.

There are many gems in this show.

Nothing is wasted. She likes rescuing discarded materials from their fate in the landfill and paints them. Glass pieces wound up as reverse painting vignettes. She looked wistfully at a stack of DVDs wondering what she would make of them.

When she gouges out a piece of her larger works, she saves the cutouts, then uses them to create more paintings and even greeting cards.

Keely calls herself “an artist by accident.” It’s no accident, believe me, because she’s multiskilled and has worked in many media and styles. You won’t see her lush landscapes, her whimsical sketches or her still lifes in this show, but you can view them and all her visual musing on her website: sandrakeely.com.

Get lucky yourself. Go see the show and you can literally “feel” her art!

First Friday Artist Talk July 3, 5 p.m. at: M Stark Gallery, 727 Main St., Half Moon Bay, mstarkgallery.com, (415) 407-8743

Bart Charlow, author, artist and consultant blends over 45 years of painting and photography with narrative storytelling. Explore the intersection of observation and expression through his insights on the local art scene, find his books at bartcharlow.com and his art at bartsart.weebly.com.