New Exhibition Dives Into Water as a Source of Everyday Enchantment

“Swimmer,” 2025. Oil on masonite panel. (Photo: Paul Salveson)

It takes care to observe the quotidian. In many ways, we must intentionally train our eyes to see what might otherwise strike us as ordinary or as a given. This act of observation anchors Claudia Keep’s practice, which revolves around everyday subjects and moments inspired by her personal archive of photographs. For her latest solo exhibition, the artist turns her gaze toward water, one of the most essential yet ubiquitous elements in our lives.

Now on view at Parker Gallery in Los Angeles, Water, Water, Everywhere gathers a slate of oil paintings whose sole focus is water. As with much of Keep’s work, the small-scale compositions explore their subjects across disparate but nevertheless mundane settings, whether it be a cafe, pool, or beach. Several canvases unfold within vehicles, with the artist filtering lush, seemingly tropical landscapes through car windows that are splattered with rain. Night drive in the rain captures this effect best, offering an expressive and highly-textured portrait of oncoming headlights abstracted by dots of rain. It’s an incredibly familiar scene, one that most viewers can resonate with and embody. That sensation is enhanced by Keep’s mastery over perspective, which is typically eye-level, as if encouraging us to experience the world through someone else’s point of view.

“Painting a road is always going to make me feel good,” Keep admitted in a 2025 interview with The Creative Independent. “It’s satisfying, it’s easy, and it always comes together compositionally.”

Keep’s car-and-road-inspired paintings are certainly interesting, but Water, Water, Everywhere finds most of its strength from her depictions of swimmers. The aptly-titled Swimmer, for example, shows a woman diving through blue-green water, her legs furiously kicking behind her. The painting is almost Futuristic in its dynamic brushstrokes and sense of movement, transforming a fleeting and perhaps banal moment into one of enchantment.

“I’m interested in capturing a sense of movement because I’m trying to paint what it feels like to see something,” Keep has said. “I think sensation comes with movement or at least a certain suggestion of physicality.”

In Water, Water, Everywhere, Keep also plays with these themes at a greater scale. The exhibition features five multi-panel paintings, a panoramic format that, as Parker Gallery says, “heightens the immersive quality of her compositions.” Particularly effective are River swimmer and Pool swimmer, once again depicting women slicing through water. In both, we see Keep distorting her subjects as they float beneath the waves, their bodies rippled, sliced, and in constant movement, propelling from one panel to the next.

What’s especially delightful, though, are the frames in the exhibition. Each painting is accompanied by a frame that mirrors its primary color palette, seamlessly extending the canvas beyond its natural borders. Sunset, at the beach, for one, boasts a peach frame reminiscent of its titular sunset, while Afternoon coffee is surrounded by a yellow frame, mimicking the painting’s plaid tablecloth.

“I think that my life is not really so different from other people’s lives,” Keep continued in her 2025 interview. “My experiences are shared, and I think that in that hyperspecificity, people find points of connection.”

Water, Water, Everywhere is on view at Parker Gallery in Los Angeles through May 30, 2026.