Windward artist Kathleen Grennan contemplates life and art at Contemporary Cafe
HONOLULU—The morning’s swollen gray sky over The Contemporary Museum in Makiki Heights has given way to sunshine and swift-moving puffs of swirling white clouds. Lunchtime patrons are clustered in the small but airy Contemporary Cafe as artist Kathleen “KC” Grennan arrives with a smile to discuss her installation/exhibition Flora & Fauna. Serene, colorful and organic, the paintings and wood burnings are evocative of their surroundings and, perhaps, of the artist herself.
“I had this googly-eyed goldfish that didn’t make it when I was a kid,” Grennan laughs. “I guess he’s kind of always been with me.” The graceful forms and exquisite detail of the subjects in the Black Moor Goldfish series give an ethereal dignity to a creature that, through the coincidences of natural selection, goes through life looking completely bewildered. The botanical paintings are similarly fluid and vivid.
Although the artist had less than a month to prepare her materials, complete the work, and install her art, the subjects of Flora & Fauna look as though they have all the time in the world. “I pretty much stopped everything I was doing and got to it,” Grennan says. That commitment and discipline is evident in the work.
Living at her Mosquito Farm Studios on the Windward side allows Grennan to balance the demand for high-end installations and commissions for patrons like the Maunalani Resort on Hawaii Island with peaceful country living. “We’ve got our dogs, Baby Girl and Bella, four cats and some chickens,” Grennan counts, before laughing again. “I kind of stopped naming the chickens.”
Things have gotten a little less hectic with the acquisition of a glass furnace capable of handling large casting loads. “Before we got it,” she explains, “we were casting in Seattle and shipping the pieces back here for installation.” She and her partner Scott Fitzel are now able to design and construct pieces on an architectural scale here at home.
Her fascination with materials and process led to her choosing the word-burning and painting methods for ,i>Flora & Fauna. Constructing the maple ply, the frames, and mixing the paints are as crucial to the work as putting down paint.
Grennan received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Hawaii after completing her undergraduate work at the Massachusetts College of Art. She spent several months at the Wheaton Arts Center, the home of a large community of glass blowers and other artists as well as the American Glass Museum in New Jersey. She’s also worked with Dale Chihuly, perhaps the best-known glass artist in the world, on his installation for the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
Ultimately, though, Kathleen Grennan would opt to strike out on her own as an artist. She describes the last few years as “fruitful.”
“I wanted to make my own art,” Grennan says. Working in a variety of two dimensional and three dimensional media, she has plenty of outlets for her copious artistic energies.
Grennan is grateful for the opportunities she’s been given, and she is humble about those she has created for herself. Operating and maintaining Mosquito Farm Studios is as much of a job as the art she creates. Her quiet confidence is apparent in her work and in her affable demeanor. Again, she smiles. “You have to have a lot of faith to do work like this.”
Flora & Fauna
Paintings and wood burnings by Kathleen C. Grennan
The Contemporary Museum Cafe Gallery
March 23 through May 2
2411 Makiki Heights Drive
Cafe Gallery hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
