SLAM, the Savannah Local Artists Market spearheaded by the energetic and positive Charlie Ellis (see my 2021 column), will be held on Saturday, November 11 in the ballfield behind the Salvation Army at 3000 Bee Road. One of the more than 85 makers and artists showing their work is figurative painter Mary Carol Kenney, a fun, outgoing, soon-to-be-70-year-old who seems at least 10 to 15 years younger.
We meet in Kenney’s comfortable Baldwin Park home where she has converted a light-filled front room into her painting studio and discuss the journey that brought her to Savannah in 2021. She had been living temporarily in Indiana to care for her ailing mother, and following her death, decided to move to Maine. “I think it was subconscious,” she laughs, “In all the pandemic movies you watch, they all move to Maine! So, I got there, and it was all New Yorkers. It was freezing cold. And there was absolutely nothing to rent.” She stayed with friends for two months before, at another friend’s suggestion, packing up and moving to Savannah never having been here before. “I just fell in love.”
Always artistic, Kenney grew up in Indianapolis. Her home life was a bit chaotic, and she was only able to attend the Heron School of Art for two years. “When I walked in that art school, the smell of oil paint was intoxicating to me.” But she confesses, “I actually didn’t qualify to get in. They said, ‘You can take classes’ and I thought they meant regular classes, but I think they really meant night classes! So, I just showed up for registration. They didn’t have computers back then and I ended up taking all the same foundational classes as people who did get accepted. I got great grades!”
Kenney spent the next decades waitressing, marrying, having three kids, divorcing and becoming a single mom. She supported her family through working as a seamstress for about ten decorators in Bloomington, Indiana. Without much time for art, “I would draw my kids at night when they were asleep. And then, after they were grown and had all moved away, I met this woman who was the wife of the Chancellor of the University. I sewed a lot for her, and we became good friends. She had just bought a condo in California, and I traveled with her to Santa Barbara to sew drapes and slipcovers for it.” Like her arrival in Savannah two decades later, she says of California, “It was love at first sight.”
A year later, Kenney loaded up her sewing machine and made the permanent move to Santa Barbara. “They had this art school there that was so incredible. You could take all types of classes – everything from jewelry making to film studies to psychology classes. I started out with sculpture and pottery. Their stone carving class was like being in heaven. It was outside, overlooking the ocean.” By now in her 50’s, Kenney showed her clay sculptures through the Santa Barbara Art League. “I was sewing all day long and taking classes at night. Then I started painting...”
“…I thought I needed to be a landscape painter, because everyone in Santa Barbara is a landscape painter!” Kenney tells me with a smile. “I took a landscape class, but it rained every single time I was supposed to paint outside. So that’s kind of why I started figurative painting.”
She shows me an old door, purchased for $5 and mounted on the wall to the right of her fireplace. On it is her very first figurative painting. “It took me six months. I could only work at night. I’d wake up and sand her face off and start over!” The finished work is absolutely astounding: a life-sized woman stands in half shadow, her face towards the viewer over her bared right shoulder, her form-fitting sequined dress sparkles and glistens, and the fringes of her floral Spanish shawl almost sway before our eyes.
Kenney’s first figurative teacher was an artist called Rick Stitch. Recognizing and encouraging her natural talent, he became her mentor and advised her on which artists to study: the sculptural quality of her work reminded him of Lucian Freud and Henri Matisse, while her technique and composition reminded him of American painter Alice Neel. These similarities and influences are evident in her early painting of a reclining nude couple: she perfectly captures the languor, the light, the skin tones, and the folds of the man’s mustard colored robe.
Kenney lived in California for twelve years, eventually having her own little painting and sewing studio down by the beach. But with the recession and spiraling real estate prices, “it felt like doors were closing” and she moved to Texas to be with her daughter and her first grandchild, before moving back to Indiana to help her mother who was dealing with dementia. As noted above, her next move, during Covid, was to Maine and then to Savannah.
Kenney says she was very prolific while she was looking after her mother – painting a series of beautifully executed, over scaled flowers; a fun series of work inspired by old mugshots; and several paintings of photographs of her mother as a young woman. However, her preference is to paint from life, and when she first moved here, she took figure drawing at Telfair Museums.
We discuss several nudes and studies painted in California, a painting that was on the cover of September 2016’s The Artists Magazine, and a sublime portrait of a woman entitled “The Unwanted Guest.” The woman gazes out at a wedding party, her skin and white silk dress exquisitely rendered. Time and time again, Kenney sublimely captures the drapery, texture, lights, and shadows of folds of fabric.
Today, Kenney makes most of her art-generated income through selling screen-printed tee-shirts, cyanotypes, and gouache-painted screen prints of such iconic figures as Albert Einstein, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jimmy Hendrix, Taylor Swift, Greta Hunberg, or David Bowie. You can find her set up in Forsyth Park most Saturdays. But her first love, of course, is her figurative oil painting, and she would welcome the opportunity to be represented by a local gallery. From time to time, Kenney sells her stunning work and happily takes commissions.
Find Mary Carol Kenney at SLAM on November 11 between 10 and 4pm behind the Salvation Army at 3000 Bee Road, and on most other Saturdays at Forsyth Park. See her work on Instagram @marycarolkenney and at marycarolkenney.com.
