Bob Keefer is a fine art photographer based near Eugene, Oregon, where he has lived on acreage in the rainforest for more than forty years. He creates one-of-a-kind hand-colored photographs — black-and-white images printed on fine art paper and painted by hand with acrylics — depicting the landscapes, wildlife, and trees of the American West.
Trees have been a recurring subject throughout his career. Following artist residencies at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in 2014 and 2015, he mounted a solo exhibition of old-growth tree stump portraits at the Jacobs Gallery in the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, and his photographs were selected to illustrate Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest, a collection of essays and poems published by the University of Washington Press in 2016. His image of a tree replanted in a logging clear cut was acquired for the Art About Agriculture permanent collection at Oregon State University. His current series of tree portraits extends this long engagement, exploring individual trees as living presences shaped by decades of weather, growth, and survival.
Keefer has presented solo exhibitions in 2025-26 across western Oregon. His work can be seen at Karin Clarke Gallery in Eugene, Mindpower Gallery in Reedsport, and Studio 7 in Veneta. In 2023 he co-curated “Rural,” a group exhibition of work by rural Oregon artists at Umpqua Valley Arts in Roseburg.
He has held artist residencies at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest (2014, 2015) and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming (2016). His work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Oregon ArtsWatch, The Register-Guard, the Roseburg News-Review, and the French photography journal L’Oeil de la Photographie.
He came to visual art through a distinguished career in journalism spanning more than fifty years. Beginning at the Long Beach Press-Telegram in Southern California and the Idaho Statesman in Boise, he spent three decades as a feature writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene, where an assignment profiling an oil painter sparked a deep engagement with visual art. He studied art history and studio art at Lane Community College, and eventually turned from writing about art to making it.
He currently serves as Arts Editor Emeritus at Eugene Weekly, where in 2021 he conceived and led a yearlong project publishing extended obituaries of every person who died while homeless in Lane County — work that earned first place in the Pacific Northwest Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Competition. In 2006 he enjoyed a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in theater journalism.