| Ron Keas was born in Salinas
California in 1943, and raised in a small trailer by his
grandmother. She was from Oklahoma and was one of
the people John Steinbeck wrote about. She trimmed
lettuce in a lettuce shed in Salinas for 35 cents an hour,
but Ron never felt poor. He studied violin from the
3rd grade through High School, and demonstrated unusual
talent in art in the first grade. As a child, his
imagination was always at work creating ideas for
inventions that he made into toys. He was never
bored. By the time Ron was a teenager, his mother was back in his life and gave him a good home through High School. He took an interest in photography at age 13, and built his own darkroom. His talents in photography grew through the years. When he attended San Jose City College, his majors were photography and art history. In 1963 he joined the Navy, and spent 3 years as a combat photographer in the Viet Nam war. After his discharge, he worked as a freelance artist/photographer until present day. Ron first gained national attention with his artwork in 1983, when local Channel 8 News, in Salinas did a story about him painting oil portraits of children's Cabbage Patch dolls. The story was passed on to the NBC Today Show. He continued to paint pictures inspired by the News Media. For example, when Pope John Paul II visited Carmel Ca, Mayor Clint Eastwood greeted him at the Carmel Mission. This news inspired Ron's artistic imagination, and sense of humor, to do an oil painting of Clint dressed as an ice-cream man, pushing a cart, and handing the Pope 3 ice-cream cones- Vanilla, Strawberry, and Chocolate. In the background was pictured the Mission. This painting was published in magazines and newspapers across America and around the World. Riding on the wave of this notoriety, Ron sold lithograph posters of his oil painting of Clint Eastwood dressed as a cowboy riding a hog. He titled it, High on the Hog," or "Dirty Hairy Pig". In 1985 Ron invented an optical illusion he called Echo-Vision. He had also developed and built a folding stereoscopic viewer that he used to view his own 3-D stereographs. He set up a prehistoric terrarium on his porch, and photographed Dinosaur models in stereo-3D. The stereographs he made from these photo-shoots were sold with the stereo-viewer on the internet. In 1986 these stereographs drew the attention of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. He and Ron became friends over the internet, and Ron sent 50 stereo-viewers and Dinosaurs sets to Arthur as gifts to the children he cared for at Shri Lanka. During this time, Ron traveled to the most popular National Parks to photograph them in 3-D in order to produce stereographs that he would sell with stereo-viewers on the internet. In 1997, the first Mar's Rover landed on Mars. NASA put photos taken by the Rover camera on the internet. Ron downloaded these 2-D images and selected the ones with the angles that would allow for 3-D stereo-graphs to be made. He then published these images to the internet, days before NASA did the same, making Ron the first to publish 3-D images of the surface of Mars. These stereograph sets were also sold on the internet. From 1986 until 2004 Ron lived in Ben Lomond, a small town in the Santa Cruz Redwoods mountains. There he photographed the Redwood's State Parks and supplied their Visitor Centers with stereo-images and slideshows of the Parks. For the next 20 years, Ron lived in Lake County, Ca. where he photographed the beauty of nature. In 2006, Presidential candidate Obama drew Ron's attention. He began painting oil portraits of Obama that were inspired by current events. Four of Ron's Obama paintings were featured at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. His painting of the First Family was featured in the Diversity Calendar, handed out at Obama's first inauguration. The HuffingtonPost wrote, Ron Keas' Obama Paintings Make Us Proud To Be American. His portrait of Hillary sitting in the Oval Office was responded to with a heart warming letter from her to the artist. Most recently Ron Has been commissioned by Mansions in Illinois, to paint portraits of famous Americans, including his much talked about portrait of President Lincoln that now hangs at the Ayers Estate in Jacksonville, Illinois. He is also known for his oil paintings that appear on the front page of the New York Times, magazines, newspapers, and books including "Art for Marilyn," Princess Diana in Art, " and "Art for Obama." This year Ron moved to San Francisco, eager to photograph the iconic views of the City. Photographic prints of his word are considered to be collectibles. He will also be producing mounted photo prints, and panoramic images including anaglyphic 3-D panoramic images to be viewed with red and blue glasses supplied with the prints.
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