Artist Documents Pasadena, Altadena in Paint

For decades, Keni Arts has been setting up his easel throughout Pasadena and Altadena to capture the community on canvas.

From the iconic Rose Bowl to small mom-and-pop businesses, Arts preserves snapshots of local life in watercolor. As a ‘plein air’-style painter, he generally completes his works outdoors while observing the subject.

The 71-year-old Altadena resident and former Pasadena resident says he especially enjoys painting the area’s unique buildings, bridges and other landmarks. While people sometimes venture into his field of view and get included in the paintings, it’s the structures that are his focus.

“Pasadena has some beautiful architecture.Everything from modern to some of the older styles,” Ars said. 

“Pasadena is just one of the richest cities on the West Coast to paint,” he said. “That’s one of the things that really inspires, me — just the beauty of the architecture.”

Paintings included in a gallery Arts has created titled “Two Denas” include everything from portraits of the Rose Bowl and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to residential neighborhoods and parks.

Arts said he enjoyed preserving not only images, but memories of times gone by, in his paintings.

His documentation of the Pasadena area began in 1977 with a sketch of a carpet business at Colorado Boulevard and Arroyo Parkway, which he revisited as a painting 20 years later titled “Colorroyo,” he said. The business is now long gone, and the intersection has undergone a dramatic facelift in the decades since.

“One day, my friend was notified by the owners of the building complex that he would have to move,” Arts wrote in a description accompanying the work. “It wasn’t long after he moved that all the other shops had been vacated. I had a suspicion that something was about to happen to the property. I took my sketchbook out to the site to sketch it.”

“That really got me started,” he said.

Arts, a lifelong painter, moved to Pasadena from Los Angeles in the 1970s and immediately began putting brush to canvas to depict the local scenery. He moved to Altadena about a dozen years ago, where he lives with his wife and family.

When COVID-19 social distancing restrictions prevented painting in the open air, he began working from inside his car, ultimately compiling a gallery of paintings titled “CarArt Series.”

“I started doing that to take people’s minds of the pandemic,” he said.

Arts work can be viewed and purchased on his website, keniarts.com.