Keith Lord When Keith Lord was a child, art was magical. It was a magical way for him to capture what something looked like. So he has been drawing since he was young. But the more he came to understand about art, the more he realized “the desire to create is in all of us.” “It’s so exciting for me to be in my studio creating something no one has ever seen before,” says Lord, who characterizes himself predominately as a sculptor who typically uses non-traditional art materials. “The material I use is very flexible. Its very dependent on what I’m trying to get across or what I think might be appropriate.” Asked about inspiration, Lord said he doesn’t know many artists who could answer that question. But he finds his ideas “mostly through experimentation and play and observation of the world.” “If you’ve ever been in one of my classes, you know I’m always playing with things,” Lord says. And soon enough he picks up a wire and starts bending it as he talks. Lord says he constantly experiments with how things work and what they can do. “My exploration for the world is not looking for pieces to do art work; my exploration of the world is just fascination with the world,” he says. “When I find something that really fascinates me I consider allowing that to influence what I do.” “My work for the last 10 years has a basis in science and the types of physical properties that are explainable but still magical,” Lord says. “Like magnets, mirrors, lenses, electrical motors, lights; things that can create a sense of wonder.” Lord has a background in science from joining the Navy after high school. “I was really into science, and for some bizarre reason I thought I’d like to study nuclear power,” he says. So for six years he worked the nuclear reactor on submarines for the Navy and traveled to places like Asia, Africa and the South Pacific. Traveling with the Navy sparked an interest in Lord about the rest of the world. “Travel made me want to travel more,” he says. He has been to six continents – “everything but Antarctica.” Lord enjoys traveling because even when he’s in a place different from home, he finds a sense of humanity and a connection to people everywhere. He says people are the same everywhere; there are just differences in cultural climate and the way cultures express themselves through dance, music, food, etc. Lord has been traveling all his life, even prior to the Navy. As a child whose father was in the Air Force, Lord lived in Japan when he was 5 to 7 years old. “I have a lot of childhood memories of Japan,” Lord says. He has been back as an adult and has traced his steps to places he went as a child. Being 20 years later, he says it was significantly different. “My impression of it was different too. I was a whole lot more aware of what was going on around me. At 5 or 6, I didn’t realize how extraordinary it was to live in Japan. It was just where I lived.” Lord has hiked Mt. Fuji in Japan. Growing up in Sacramento, he also spent time camping and hiking in the Sierras. After his undergraduate education, he came to realize he has a love of nature because of these experiences, and he was then more socially aware. “I realized it was important to me,” Lord says. “And I realized if it is important to me I should be doing something about it. So I started supporting some environmental actions.” Lord participates in political activism around environmental issues in the Los Angeles area, where he also lives in an art colony. His wife is a painter, and they both have a studio within their home. “When I say studio, I mean workshop, my mad scientist laboratory,” Lord jokes. His other hobbies include hiking in the woods, windsurfing and mountain biking, but he says he spends most of his time doing art and teaching. “I consider myself an artist who is a professor rather than a professor who makes art,” Lord says. About himself as a professor, he says, “I think I have an easy going, casual attitude in class. My students will tell you I push them. I really challenge them to take their ideas further and further. I try to make the classroom experience fun and comfortable as well as challenging.” RETURN TO FACULTY LISTmailto:lordk@ulv.edu?subject=HELLOHome.htmlshapeimage_1_link_1
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