About Studio Kei

Artist Statement

Kei Weaver (they/them) is a nonbinary visual artist based in Petaluma, California. Their paintings seek to find balance in a world built around polarities—combining expressive, heavily pigmented watercolor with the decisiveness of black ink. Each painting seeks to balance these two elements in its own unique way.

Kei’s work takes inspiration from numerous disparate sources: backyard California poppies and the Sonoma Coast, the elaborate Art Nouveau work of artists like Alphonse Mucha and Kay Nielsen, golden-era 80s and 90s anime, contemporary manga, the childhood gleam of foil sports cards…

Each piece hopes to inspire, to heal, to reflect, to encourage the creation of something new.

Educational Background

Kei explored various career paths before coming out as trans-femme nonbinary in their 40s and finding a way to properly express themselves in art. They pursued physics as a way out of rural Pennsylvania, earning a B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S. from Cornell University. They jumped ship to write fiction, earning an MFA in creative writing at the University of Maryland–College Park. 

Kei’s been a technical writer and editor in clean energy (supporting clients like the U.S. Department of Energy), an accomplished beer writer (publishing The Northern California Craft Beer Guide under their given name Ken), a middling fiction writer (one Pushcart nomination, baby!), and a pretty decent cartoonist (publishing 150 issues of Massive Potions, a webcomic about a brewery at the end of the world).

They have taught college-level courses in calculus, physics, English composition, and creative writing. Given the experiences of their previous MFA program, Kei’s visual art education has been entirely self-driven, learning from books and YouTube and following their intuition. 

In all these efforts has been a desire to understand themselves and connect with the world as they truly are. Their wife Anneliese Schmidt has been incredibly supportive of this journey for decades, and none of this would exist without her.

–Kei