Margaret Keane: Paint

“Gradually it dawned on me that I was painting my own inner emotions. Those children were asking: "Why are we here? What is life all about? Why is there sadness and injustice?" All those deep questions. Those children were sad because they didn't have the answers. They were searching.”

Margaret Keane

1999, Cited by Amy M. Spindler
Context: Gradually it dawned on me that I was painting my own inner emotions. Those children were asking: "Why are we here? What is life all about? Why is there sadness and injustice?" All those deep questions. Those children were sad because they didn't have the answers. They were searching.

Life , Children , Sadness , Search

“I'd have to lock the door of the paint room. He wouldn't allow anyone in. I was like a prisoner.”

Margaret Keane

1999, Cited by Amy M. Spindler

Painting

“It was the eyes that did it. [timid giggle] I liked the way he painted eyes and he liked mine.”

Margaret Keane

Stated at a time when Margaret Keane was still going along with the fraud that her husband was the painter of the Big Eyed waifs.
Cited by Jane Howard, " The Man Who Paints Those Big Eyes: The Phenomenal Success of Walter Keane https://books.google.com/books?id=WFMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA39," LIFE 59, no. 9 (27 August 1965), p. 45.
1965, Cited by Jane Howard

Way , Painting

“He can't paint eyes. He couldn't learn to paint at all.”

Margaret Keane

Cited in " The lady behind those Keane-eyed kids https://books.google.com/books?id=2FMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56," LIFE 69, no. 21 (20 November 1970), p. 56.
1970

Learning , Painting

“I still paint sad children, because there's sadness in the world, but they have hope, and I have hope.”

Margaret Keane

2014, Cited by Jesse Hamlin

Children , World , Sadness , Hope

“A lot of art today doesn't convey much hope, and I hope mine does. I try to paint what I think the future holds and my innermost feelings about God's promise for the future.”

Margaret Keane

1999, Cited by Amy M. Spindler

God , Hope , Art , Feeling

“I had just announced for the first time publicly on a radio show in San Francisco that I had done all the Keane paintings and not my ex-husband. And this, um, Bill Flang of the San Francisco Examiner thought that Walter and I should appear in Union Square and have a paint-off to decide who had done the paintings, since I was—said that I had done them. So, he arranged it, and LIFE magazine as there and all the different newspapers and t. v. stations and they, uh—some of them in the audience played "High Noon"—[laughs] And, of course, Walter didn't show up.”

Margaret Keane

Interviewed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMK6aBSX2QY on The Mike Douglas Show (1972).
1972

Life , Appearance , Time , Painting