Today we’d like to introduce you to Maura Kenny.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
After finishing my MFA degree in Painting (1980) from UNC Greensboro, my now husband who is from Ireland and I headed to South Carolina from the Northeast on a total life journey. Neither of us had ever been to South Carolina before and our first few weeks in Myrtle Beach were spent living out of a tent and navigating our way around the SC coast. Prior to this adventure as an artist and art educator who had been teaching art in the public school system in Connecticut for four years and who had found a passion for painting and drawing at the early age of ten years old, I had no idea what my artistic future would be in South Carolina. All I knew was that it felt right somehow to be here in SC and I searched out the local artistic community and found it in the Waccamaw Arts and Crafts Guild (WACG) where I met many friends and other creatives who held meetings, exhibited and supported each other’s artistic endeavors.
It was through another painter in the WACG that an opening for an art instructor at USC Coastal Carolina now Coastal Carolina University (CCU) in Conway was made known to me. Then several years of part time instructing evolved into a full-time position, and eventually tenure at CCU. After 34 years as an artist /educator at Coastal Carolina University, 2 years as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and 4 years of teaching Art to Elementary School students, I retired from the art teaching profession in 2018 from CCU as Distinguished Professor Emeritus. I loved sharing my passion and knowledge for the visual arts with my students at every level.
As a practicing artist I have enjoyed painting both in oil and watercolor. My preferred medium was oil paint, and my home studio had always accommodated my working in both media until it didn’t! Then for health reasons watercolor became my main means of expression and with watercolor paint I have found materials that are seemingly endless in their combinations. Watercolor applique, stitchery and beads, Prismacolor pencil, and a wide variety of other materials keep me intrigued by this ‘Eveready’ medium for new discoveries and experimentation. I am now retired seven years, and I actively paint and draw in my home studio. In 2021 I had a one-person exhibit of my paintings entitled “Where the Rivers Flow” at the Myrtle Beach Art Museum and a professional video of this exhibit can be found on You Tube. The fluidity of the water environment of Coastal South Carolina has shaped my life for 45 years. I have witnessed the indescribable beauty of blackwater rivers and felt the fury of a vicious Atlantic hurricane, but it is the incredible beauty of earth scent and reflective water that is the pre-eminent catalyst to these river paintings.
In addition to showing my work at a local Pawleys Island Art Gallery of figurative, botanicals and landscape paintings, I have recently taken on the venture of book illustration.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
A few challenges that required flexibility were;
* seeking an art community in Myrtle Beach in 1980 where I did not know a soul
* balancing artistic pursuits, teaching as well as becoming a new mother
* retooling my preferred paint medium from oil to watercolor due to health concerns
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a painter/educator. I always knew I would have to learn how to paint portraits, landscape, and still life to the best of my ability in order to help my future students. So, I practiced, studied and worked relentlessly on the representation of those realistic subjects. Also, I am not an abstract painter, but I did realize that my knowledge of abstraction had to be effective in my teaching in order to facilitate students who wanted to work in this style.
My personal work is watercolor on paper, which includes waterscapes, landscapes and portraits and I truly enjoy expression through representation, but I also have another portion of my work that merges and layers figures with botanicals and animals, using mixed media-watercolor. In the mixed media paintings, I have appliqued, or sewn figures painted on translucent Yupo onto background painted textures of maps, landscape, lace and flower gardens. I sometimes sew glass beads, feathers, etc. into the watercolor paper. I am against using added objects in a flamboyant way but rather discretely sew them into my paintings with the intention of having the viewer discover on close inspection of the painting a little surprise of beads, gold leaf, lace or stitchery, etc., as a reward for their interest in looking closely at the painting surface. I feel what sets my watercolors apart from other watercolors is the addition of these mixed media elements and those little glimmers of surprise upon close inspection of the paintings surface.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Big R
I feel risk taking is an essential ingredient in art making whether it is Risk with a capital R or risk with a small r. One of my big Risks was my move from the Northeast to SC where the unknown for my life as an artist and art educator was yet to be determined. Another big Risk was my need to transition to the watercolor medium after working in oil paints for 26 years having loved the oil medium dearly and yet having to replace it for a relatively new medium. It was a risk starting from scratch in watercolor, teaching myself how the watercolor process works and how the medium and watercolor paper interact.
small r
Every time I make a painting I am faced with a variety of small risks that with one wrong decision, whether technically or expressively, could ruin many hours of work or perhaps just start it off in a different direction. Sometimes a difficult technical decision gives me a fright before I employ it, and I have to hold my breath and with some mindful thinking, jump in, feeling like a jump off a high cliff into water below.
I feel all artists are risk takers to some degree, some small some big but always taking leaps of faith into the creative realm.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: maurakennyart
- Youtube: Maura Kenny: “Where the Rivers Flow” on YouTube
