How Louisiana Inspires Artist Kathy Dumesnil’s Landscapes

August 1, 2024

John R. Kemp,

Song of Flora No. 3

The South Louisiana landscape with its flowering bayous, marshes, warm humid light, painterly sunsets and seemingly evergreen prairies has never failed to inspire artists. One can clearly see that inspiration in the paintings of Lafayette artist Kathy Dumesnil, who describes that beauty and her work as a “celebration of the rich tapestry of nature” and “a liberating exploration.”

Dumesnil is drawn to the region’s natural landscape whether she is painting broad, spatial vistas or the colorful and often abstract images of the “flora and botanicals” that grow wild in that landscape. When out in the natural environment in her kayak or hiking on wooded trails, she feels compelled to sketch and capture those images she describes as “free-flowing organic shapes with an edge of abstraction.”

“I experience a visceral excitement and connection within myself, a spaciousness and flow,” she says. “It takes away thinking and the daily noise of life. This resonance speaks to my being and where paintings actually begin. Just being in nature’s beauty and presence is meaningful and creates a story for my artmaking.”

Dumesnil also draws comparison between her paintings and the Japanese aesthetic “wabi-sabi,” which roughly states that beauty is transient. The glorious colors of autumn foliage and spring flowers radiate across the landscape and then disappear with the change of seasons. They live on in her paintings, however.

Abstraction Lily Lotus Series

“It is an aesthetic view of appreciating beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete in nature,” she says. “It is also an appreciation of natural objects and the forces of nature. I love observing plants in their fullest peak as well as in their waning or deconstruction. I love the beauty in the patina as the forms change in shape, color and texture.”

Whether painting landscapes or the abstract images of wild “flora and botanicals,” Dumesnil says her goal is to create “a sense of place and that the viewer connects” to that place.

Although she completes most of her larger paintings in her studio, Dumesnil works mostly with watercolors, gouache and pen when traveling or out in the natural landscape. “I never leave home without my journal and papers,” she says. “I have a go-to set of concise art tools to do quick studies or to do more indulged paintings of my surroundings and experience.”

Dumesnil truly has been on a self-described “ever-evolving journey” since studying dance and art at what’s now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Although dance was her major, she also studied art history and the visual arts, including drawing lessons with the renowned Louisiana artist Elemore Morgan Jr.

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While in college, she also took up fabric art to help design her own costumes. With the urging of a friend, she took time off from classes and headed up to New York to study contemporary dance with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company at Wolf Trap. After graduation in 1975, she went back to New York for about a year to dance with the Marleen Pennison and Phoebe Neville dance companies. After that bite at the Big Apple and life in the big city, Dumesnil took off for Arkansas and the Ozarks where she “lived a hippie life learning to grow organic food and gained new life skills.”

A bit homesick, she returned to Louisiana in about 1980, gave up her hippie lifestyle and with five other dancers formed the Moving South Dance Company that performed throughout Louisiana and Texas. Dumesnil also continued her fabric art, eventually creating her own fabric artistry business. Then in 2004, she married Peter Bulliard who encouraged her art.

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“I began traveling and studying painting more as therapy,” she says. “I then became more serious and directed my study to teachers whose styles I resonated with. In 2008, after a trip to Bali and my mother’s passing, I began an even further immersion into my visual expression with different visual mediums. In 2010, I fully devoted myself to exploring and continuing to study mostly painting to develop my work.”

That exploration and transition, she says, has given her a “new realm of freedom of expression.” And that expression has gained her considerable recognition. She has received several impressive awards and shows, and her art is now in numerous corporate and private collections.

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