by Tina Cachules on September 1, 2011.

In Bainbridge Island artist Kenna Moser’s mixed media painting Direct, a tiny woman in summer clothing waves a giant licorice fern frond toward a bird. The miniature speckled bird is perched on a flowering branch that seems to be an extension of the black cancel mark on the vintage stamp behind it. The stamp is part of the piece’s foundation: a very old and delicate envelope laid flat to reveal the handwritten words Mssrs. Greenleaf and Hubbard, New Orleans, an echo from a time when such an address was sufficient for delivery. It was sent in June of an unknown year from Boston.

There are many echoing elements within the work: the summer month played out in the cap-sleeved tunic and capri pants of the tiny woman, the Greenleaf name below the green fern frond, the tomato orange of the cancel stamp replicated in oil paint on the woman’s tunic. A layer of perfectly smooth clear beeswax seems to represent a passage of time as well as space between the vintage collage pieces and the fine painted elements. The work is mounted on a deep wooden box that hangs out from the wall but easily could sit on a flat surface. There is much to see, and all of it exists in a six-by-six-inch space.

"Direct" by Kenna Moser, 2011.

“Big paintings come at you. Little ones require you to approach them and experience them in a small space,” says the artist.

Now in the twenty-first year of her career, Kenna Moser has used Bainbridge Island as inspiration and home for her art since 2004, when she and her family moved here from Seattle. Prior to Seattle she had spent time in Palo Alto, California, and Ontario, Canada, where she attended Queens University and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. We met last week while she prepared for her first solo show of 2011, at the Grover Thurston Gallery in Pioneer Square. She shows at this gallery every two years, and in general has two to three regular shows on the West Coast every year. In addition to her solo shows, her regular galleries retain her work year round.

Her loft studio mirrors the style of her art: whimsically eclectic, extraordinarily edited, and precisely arranged. The walls are gallery white and bathed in natural light from the pitched ceiling and abundant windows. A long antique wooden table with drawers takes up half the length of the room. On the table are a row of vintage French books, a tidy palette of paints, a jar of fine brushes, an arrangement of cut out collage elements on a board, and several stacks of handmade white boxes for transporting the art to the gallery. A table on the wall opposite contains a display-worthy yet functional assortment of vintage ephemera.

Her paintings line the walls in the arrangement she has planned for the Grover Thurston show. She explains that having a show as a deadline is helpful for finishing a body of work, but that she never quite knows how the pieces will interact or display until they are all finished. She likes to see what kinds of themes emerge after the paintings are complete, and arranges them according to her instinctual feeling about how the pieces might speak to each other. While each piece is intended to be a standalone work, her collectors often purchase two or more paintings that seem to tell a story together.

Kenna’s process for creating these stories is multiphased, and aligns with her lifelong interests of exploring nature and collecting. For her collage pieces, she scours stamp collector shows and antique stores to find vintage texts that predate 1850 and meet her criteria for beauty and interest. Over the years she has developed a distinctive and deep intuition about what could belong in her art. She is drawn to objects that have a past and to the history of art making, which includes the use of wood, beeswax, and oil paint. She likes the sculptural quality of boxes, and this shows up in her choice to mount her work on wooden boxes. These elements, along with her overarching interest in the intersection of human and nature, have come together over the years to form her own “visual language.”

The Bainbridge Island environment also plays a specific role in her creations. She enjoys gardening and exploring her woodland property, which features several thriving nurselogs and a seasonal stream. Ferns, flowers, maple keys, and other botanical elements from her environment have found their way into her work since she has lived on the island. The access to nature and the abundance of studios and outbuildings were the primary reasons that she and her family made the leap across the water from Seattle.

She begins each work by selecting a piece of vintage text to use as the base. She mounts the paper onto a primed wooden box. The next step is to cut out and position selected collage elements, which also come from vintage texts, such as old dictionaries. Candidates for excision from the old dictionaries include interesting looking people, animals, and botanical drawings. She positions them together, often combining cut-outs to create something surreal and whimsical and glues them in place on the text. This step takes much deliberation, as she strives for a perfect feeling of interplay within the elements. After the items are glued to the surface, she paints hot beeswax or encaustic over the entire piece, and smooths it to a glass-like finish using a signature and secret process. Once the beeswax is stable, she uses tiny paint brushes to add detail and color on the collage pieces. She also sometimes paints a larger element such as a feather, flower, or fern frond. Because the oil paint is placed over the clear wax, there is a dimensional quality that gives the colors a lusciousness and vibrancy that she enjoys. She has had clients ask whether or not her feathers are real due to the detail and color quality. She laughingly says, “I once read that Audubon used one-bristle brushes, so I don’t feel too bad about my tiny brushes.”

The final step in her process is the gallery show. As the daughter of a hardware store owner, Kenna has a side of her that enjoys the last phase of packaging her art and hanging her shows. She likes to see her art through to the end, which luckily has meant consistent sales even through the recession. She credits her small scale and commensurate pricing for helping her through the last few years. Her pieces range from $950 to $1500. She is represented by three galleries on the West Coast, which hold regular shows and retain inventory throughout the year. “It’s a marriage of sorts,” she says, and is quick to add how having the right representation can really make or break an artist. She says it has been important to work with galleries that sell art that she personally likes, because she knows that they will attract a client base with a compatible aesthetic. Along with Grover Thurston Gallery in Seattle, she is represented by the Gail Severn Gallery in Sun Valley, Idaho, and Sue Greenwood Fine Art in Laguna Beach, California.

"Feat" by Kenna Moser, 2011.

In this most recent body of work she produced for her Grover Thurston show, she has included licorice ferns, feathers, a few pieces of vertical Japanese text, and tiny heads that she seamlessly positions in whimsical spots in her pieces. “Humor finds its way into my work naturally,” she says, and tells me that a lot of people don’t notice the little heads until the second time around. She shows me a few examples, including a piece called “Feat,” and, indeed, I am almost startled by the discovery of tiny heads growing out of hydrangea petals. I privately wonder if she intended to play with the term hydrangea, as the man seems to be jumping into water. The town name of Wakefield poses a similar question in my mind, and this is the point at which I realize I am forming my own story about this piece, much like her collectors have done over the years.

She graciously allows me to snap a few pictures of her space, and we decide that her profile picture should be taken outside next to one of the grand nurselogs in her front yard.

Here are the details for Kenna’s Seattle show:

"Scribe" by Kenna Moser, 2011.

Kenna Moser: Recollection

• Show dates: May 5–28
• Artist’s reception May 5, 6:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.
• Grover Thurston Gallery
  • 309 Occidental Avenue South, Pioneer Square
  • (206) 223-0816
  • www.groverthurston.com

“Direct,” “Feat,” and “Scribe” images courtesy of Kenna Moser.

Other images by Tina Cachules.