Seeking God

William O’Keefe is a Boston-Cambridge Artist who is on a quest to understand God. He believes that knowledge of the great hereafter comes to him in his dreams, nightmares and night terrors. He also believes that other beings reach out across space and time to contact him as well. He attempts to capture these glimpses of other worlds and other dimensions via his paintings.

   Those people who have seen him on Comcast’s “Chronicle” or cable television’s “A&E” know that the colorful, somewhat eccentric artist, unlike many artists, is also more than willing to discuss his beliefs and paintings. Using sweeping hand and arm gesters combined with his deep melodic voice that sounds exactly like legendary actor Willem Dafoe, Billy will explain his explorations into the world of spirits for as along as he has an audience. His arguments are accompanied by intense passion combined with the oratorical skills of a politician or snake oil salesman trying to sway a skeptical mob. While he doesn’t claim to paint religious art, many of his paintings obviously show his interest in religious themes. He is definitely on some kind of a quest for answers to eternal questions such as “Where Do We Come From? What are We? Where Are We Going?” That subject was also the theme of Paul Gauguin’s greatest masterpiece when he too was on a search for understanding.

   Many viewers of W.O’K’s religious paintings will find them anything but religious. They might better describe the young painter’s work as blasphemy, sacrilege, heresy or worse—like insanity. His best artwork provokes strong reactions either pro or con. One of these paintings that W.O’K was displaying for the first time so enraged a passerby that he kicked it and would have destroyed the offending crucifixion scene had not the artist and his friends saved the painting from the enraged and unwelcome art critic.

   Still other viewers might describe W.O’K’s work as pure pornography, although that charge would be totally without merit because there is nothing sexual in his art other than most of the subjects are nude. So strong is the Puritan influence in New England, that many people confuse nudity with pornography when they are entirely different. Billy, as his friends call him, is a free thinker and the poster-boy for a free spirit. He is always thinking out of the box or in his case, out of the frame. One of his theories is that “Heaven” exists throughout the universe within dark matter, which occupies the vast space between the smaller universe of normal matter that humans occupy and can observe. 

   His quest is not completed and he will continue it. He’s a very serious artist exploring humanity’s most serious questions. While he won’t admit it, at this time in his search to see God, it appears that W.O’K believes that God is female rather than the more traditional religious concept that it was man that was made in the image and likeness of the creator and Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs. W.O’K thinks it was the other way round and that it was Eve that came first and was created in the image of the Almighty.

   This E-book contains beautiful, full-color reproductions of 34 of W.O'K's religious, semi-religious, or vaguely religious, thought-provoking, out-of-this-universe paintings. The book also contains color photographs of the painter with some of his work as well as biographical information about the young artist and his beliefs.

   Come, take a journey to an alternate dimension that the artist believes is hidden in the vast reaches of the universe's dark matter.