"The Picture Show, presenting Nebraska artists in the permanent collection of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska."

[NARRATOR] "Chad Keel, a painter in Omaha, Nebraska, uses his basement as an art studio. Among his images are his children and their toys. He paints the inner spaces of his house. And the natural world. Chad Keel records nature like a botanist. Close-up. He translates his views of jars and toys, of glass and reflections into abstract color, texture and design."
[Chad Keel] "When I choose subject matter I still have to have that emotional reaction to it to begin with in order to get interested enough to start the... the abstract visual translation. This... this painting process is fairly abstract, and in a lot of way realism is... is the most abstract of all art because it's... it's purely visual and you take out the touch and the smell and all of that. And for instance, the toys, one of the reasons why I'm painting the toys is... it's the only... it's the closest thing I could find to flowers. I get the same emotional reaction when I look at them as I do when I look at flowers.I told a story to one of my friends once about crashing into flowers when I was a kid and that's still how I feel about the things I paint. We have a large lilac hedge and it bloomed one year so that you couldn't even see the leaves. It was flowers, just a mass of flowers. And I wanted to do something with those flowers and... I got in my wagon and repeatedly bashed the flowers with the wagon and... that's still how I feel about certain things. I want to... you want to interact with them. You feel like you oughta be able to do something with them and painting is a way that... to sort of distill some kind of an experience out of things that... otherwise are... it's frustrating to be... to just stand and look at flowers, at least for me. I have trouble appreciating things unless I can eat 'em or touch 'em or consume 'em in some way."