Why return to the same place twelve times.

One place, held still. One year, allowed to move.

Most painting is the search for new subjects: new landscapes, new faces, new moments. Anno Tanaro is the inverse practice. For twelve months one place is held still, the same bank of the Tanaro, the same framing, the same light register, while the year is allowed to move. The discipline is the constraint, the meaning emerges from the accumulation of the twelve canvases.

What changes is not the place but the time. The same rocks. The same line of trees. The same horizon of mountains. But the water shifts, the leaves arrive and depart, the snow comes high then low then high again, the light angles roll through the year. Twelve paintings become the diary of those changes, not a picture-book of seasons, but a single subject traversed by twelve forms of duration.

A familiar tradition: one subject, many variations.

The form of Anno Tanaro, a single subject returned to across a defined duration, belongs to a recognizable lineage. Monet's Rouen Cathedral facades (1892–1894), painted from the same window across two years. Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–1832), one mountain seen from thirty-six positions and seasons. Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes (1980—), the horizon line photographed across two hundred bodies of water with a single camera and one set of rules. On Kawara's Today paintings (1966—), one painted date per day for almost half a century.

What these projects share is not the subject, but the method: a fixed constraint, a long duration, and the choice not to let any single image stand for the whole. This is not a claim of comparison but a kinship of method: the same constraint, a single open variable, a defined duration. Anno Tanaro enters that conversation at a more intimate scale, at the measure of one year and one river.

Finger painting, oil on cotton canvas.

Finger painting is Keili Major's signature painting technique, adopted in 2018 and her defining trait since. With fingers, paint doesn't pass through a tool: it arrives directly on the canvas. This direct contact gives speed, pressure, temperature, and a paint texture that brushes cannot reproduce. Impasto reads as alive.

Anno Tanaro is executed entirely in finger painting, without exception.

The palette is built primarily with Holbein Duo Aqua water-mixable oils, alongside other compatible oil colours when needed. The support is 380 g/m² cotton canvas. No turpentine, no solvents, no fumes; a cleaner process, closer to the material.

Read more about Keili →

The cycle, and what follows.

The cycle is offered first as a complete twelve-piece body of work to collectors interested in the full project. Individual paintings become available after the cycle closes in May 2027. For curatorial inquiries, exhibition proposals, or private acquisition, use the contact below.

info@keilimajorartist.com