Born and raised in Chicago, Kathleen Keifer is a second-generation artist. Her mother, also a fine artist, exposed Keifer to the world of art and supervised her training from a very early age. This legacy continues today as she closely nurtures the development of the artistic leaning in each of her three daughters, inspiring a third generation of female artists. She is a leading force of New California Realism. Some of her paintings show the breathtaking California scenery with its recognizable elements in a new light, while another series of paintings concentrates on depicting excerpts of popular board games from new angles with a keen eye on a clever composition and vivid colors. Keifer’s paintings invite the consideration of the complex relationship between time and timelessness. It is the sheer visual interaction between the elements, taken in their bare simplicity that interests her. Water, sky, and architecture change their appearance with the shifts in weather and light. Her broken brush strokes depict light and color in luminous waves, dissolving form into a shimmering surface of vibrant light. For her, painting captures the very essence of time and its passage. While painting landscapes, Keifer became fascinated with isolating the objects in her paintings. She believes that actual sites and places have an individual magic. Her goal is to take objects from popular culture and paint them in a new context. She began painting the silhouettes of life guard towers more as a pop art symbol than a landscape element.