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Door County Is Kerry Vavra’s Muse

When Kerry Vavra retired to Door County in 2007, he had plans to create welded yard art. 

It seemed like a doable plan. In Chicago, his medium – scrap steel – was free and in generous supply, but he soon discovered that wasn’t the case in Door County. 

“If you can’t get the steel for free, there go the profits,” Vavra said. Working long hours in a cold garage was also no longer appealing either, so his recently replaced knees and aching shoulders would also thank him for a change of pace.

That change occurred when Vavra wandered into the second floor of the Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay and laid eyes on Gerhard Miller’s watercolors. 

“I fell in love with them,” he said. “I’d never seen anything so beautiful before. I came home and told my wife, Kathleen, about it.”

“Purple Cone Flowers” by Kerry Vavra

She suggested he sign up to study with Ed Fenendael, a painter and teacher in Baileys Harbor. Taking the plunge, Vavra studied with Fenendael for six years. 

“Ed was the best teacher,” he said.

Vavra also took two workshops per summer with different art instructors at the Peninsula School of Art.

“I feel so blessed,” he said. “I don’t think this would have happened to me if I was [in] any other place than Door County. The artist community here is just so fantastic; it’s like a big family. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody helps everybody out.”

The subjects of Vavra’s paintings – mostly of scenes around Door County – range from birds and flowers to lakers and landscapes, many shown in painstaking detail. He pointed to one – a painting of three lakers, or ships – as an example. He’s reproduced it through giclée printing: archival ink-jet prints made on either paper or canvas.

“I want to paint loose, but my mind goes to detail,” he said. “I’m a detail person, but I am trying to get looser.”

The giclée prints are indistinguishable from the originals, Vavra said, and at less than half the price of an original painting, they allow many more people to buy a piece of art.

Vavra and his late wife were Master Gardeners, so flowers are another favorite subject. But not every piece is a local scene. One intriguing painting of a European village with an old bridge crossing a river into a town is based on a black-and-white photo he set to color with orange-tile roofs and dark-green trees. 

Vavra exhibits his work in the Sturgeon Bay Art Crawl, where the laker prints have been popular; at festivals around the county; and sometimes from his Sturgeon Bay home when people find him through referrals. 

“Old Mates #2” by Kerry Vavra

The informality all works well for him.

“I’m not crazy about getting into a gallery where you’ve got to be exclusive to them,” he said. “I have an independent streak in me.”

Vavra never stops learning. Recently he’s taken to watching instructional videos on YouTube by abstract painters, and even his painting media change and evolve. Despite early frustrations that he couldn’t correct watercolors the way an oil painter can repaint parts of an image, he’s learned his way around some of the problems by letting watercolor dry and building on top of it. 

“There is nothing like putting watercolor on and not touching it,” Vavra said. “You let it do its thing, let the colors blend. But if you go back in there while it’s still wet and you start monkeying around with your brush and adding more water, now you’ve changed it, and you can’t get that original effect back.”

Vavra likes to create art that sells, but he doesn’t shy away from experimenting. Working from photographs in his second-floor studio – where he’s not bothered by distractions or wind – he can turn on music, lose himself in painting for hours and still feel refreshed. 

“I will try anything once – hey, you don’t know until you try,” he said. “So you sit there, and you give it a shot, and then if it doesn’t turn out the first time, it’s just paper, so rip it up and do another one. And then hopefully you’ve learned the lesson if you blew it on the first one.”