Kendall Boggs embraces method to madness: Former interior designer caters to creative needs through her own artwork, jewelry line

For Hoover resident and artist Kendall Boggs, her professional work has always been all about design and creativity, whether that meant sprucing up the interior of a home or shaping a chic, textured painting that would bring together the final touches in a room.

For 20 years, Boggs worked as an interior designer before she got extremely burned out, especially with all the traveling, she said. One day about 11 years ago, she saw a painting of a goose at a restaurant and told her husband, “I love that painting, and I think I can paint.”

She knew she wanted to keep being creative, but not in the way she was used to as an interior designer.

“In the design industry when I quit, there was a huge emergence into flat wall, no finishing, only paint (designs), and I felt like a lot of people still wanted that ‘texture fix,’ so to speak,” Boggs said. “So, I went and got some materials and put some texture on canvas and just started playing with it and painting, and before you know it, I had a painting and then another one and then another one.”

At the time, she and her husband were living in Georgia when another artist in the area noticed her pieces and asked her to be in an art show benefit for a humane society.

“Lo and behold, I was the only artist who sold a painting there, and it was my first painting that I ever sold, and it hangs in the Bank of Georgia out there, right next to a really famous artist whose work I’ve admired forever,” Boggs said. “That gave me the steam to move forward and start painting more.”

Soon after, she went to her first “real” art show, she said, and sold around 20 paintings and was asked to be the featured artist the following year. She said she was thrown into the art world pretty fast and moved to Vestavia Hills shortly after, then eventually moved to Hoover, where her art studio has always been located. Now she works officially as a professional artist who paints mostly large canvases of figurative and representational work, church and angel series and, recently, abstract art. A lot of work is purchased by interior designers, a role with needs that she knows well.

After Artists on the Bluff closed last year, Boggs and several other displaced artists decided to create a new home they called Artists on the Plaza, so they could keep their studios in Hoover. They set up individual spaces in the stand-alone place by the Piggly Wiggly in Bluff Park, at the old Map Development building. Boggs said it’s a walk-in place, so people can visit her while she’s painting, though she warns “it’s generally a mess.”

She doesn’t paint as much textured art as she used to, she said, and is more focused now on her challenging abstract artworks. About two and a half years ago, she traveled to Big Sky, Montana, and visited the thermal ponds, which mesmerized and inspired her to try watercolor abstract pieces that looked similar to the water movement and the way the light reflected on the ponds.

“(Those paintings]) have taken off like nothing I’ve ever done before, and I’ve actually gravitated to working with acrylic ink. … It’s unbelievable. They’re just the abstract that a lot of designers are needing. I tear them into four-by-four pieces, and then do an offset matting, or I’ll do larger ones. The designers are really, really loving them,” Boggs said.

She said she also has been painting a series of popular and beautiful seascapes, which she forms with a pallet knife. Each year, Boggs participates in art shows all over the Southeast, especially in bigger cities like Atlanta and Nashville. She even recently added a jewelry line called Chunk that she sells at her shows.

Boggs, who occasionally teaches workshops in her studio, said the No. 1 thing she’s learned over the years is to stop overthinking a painting and learn when to put the paintbrush down and call it quits, especially for abstract paintings.

“You might have one little part of a painting that’s beautiful, and you love it, and then you start overworking it, and all of a sudden you can’t get that back,” she said, a mistake she has made many times before.

A lot of people, she said, don’t know that there are theories to abstract painting and the balance it requires. Boggs said people often think abstract painting “is something a kindergartner can do,” when in reality it’s far from easy.

“A lot of it is sheer creativity, and a lot of it is you just have a slap paint on a canvas and see where it goes, but there’s a method to that madness in the abstract world,” she said.

The most enjoyable part of art has always been seeing something come to life on canvas, Boggs said, and she found that when she became an artist as her full-time job, much of the relaxation that comes with making art was taken out of the process, since she was stressed knowing she had to be able to create at the studio.

To stay inspired and up to date, she looks at art constantly, she said, so she can always be evolving and growing as an artist, in addition to developing her own personal style.

“You don’t want your work looking like everybody else’s, you want your own style, and that’s really, really, really important,” she said. “… I want someone to walk in and go, ‘Oh, that’s a Kendall Boggs painting,’” she said.

Boggs said she’s “in this for the long haul” and doesn’t see herself stopping art anytime soon. She suggests going to her Instagram @kendallboggsfineart to check out some of her newer, abstract pieces, or her website to check out more of her representational and textured art at kendallboggsfineart.com.