Inviting the Imagination

Ed Fenendael spent 30 years as a dentist in Wisconsin and Kansas City before he was able to devote all of his time to his passion for art, but his heart has always been there.

“As a child,” he says, “one of my greatest joys was the smell of my new box of crayons and the feel of a sharpened pencil in my hand on the first day of school every year.” There were just five other students in his class in the one-room school he attended in tiny Pound, Wisconsin, just across Green Bay from Door County.

As a teenager, Ed’s mother had worked as a governess for the children of a Green Bay doctor who vacationed in Door County. From the family, she developed an appreciation for art and music that she passed on to Ed – an advantage most farm children did not have in the mid-20th century.

Ed’s elementary school teacher managed to work art into every subject in the curriculum; but, when he reached high school in Coleman, there were no art classes. It never occurred to the teenage Ed that art could be his life’s work. He filled his schedule with math and science courses, enrolled at Marquette and graduated with a degree in dentistry.

Ed was able to take just a couple of art classes at Marquette, but once he began his dental practice, he took evening classes in pen and ink, colored pencil and sculpture through the University of Wisconsin Extension. When he bought a practice in Kansas City in 1978, the art world really opened to him. He began classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and became very involved with the local art community. By the early 1980s, he was teaching at both the art institute and Westport School of Art. The workshops he conducted there led to invitations to teach in other parts of the country and opportunities to study with leading artists.

By 2001, Ed was able to give up his dental practice and devote all of his time to painting. His family had often come to Door County to pick cherries when he was a boy, and he remembered it as an idyllic spot for artists. He began to look for a place to live and work, but, finding nothing suitable, he rented a farmhouse near Baileys Harbor. One day when his two daughters – both also very artistic – and grandchildren were visiting, he made a wrong turn on the way home from the grocery store and noticed a for sale sign on a 10-acre farm on Fairview Road.

Today, it’s the exquisite Inn at Windmill Farm, a bed and breakfast with three charming guest rooms under the eaves of the 1900 Dutch farmhouse. There are no in-room phones or TV – just the quiet lullaby of the windmill, a library for browsing and breakfasts prepared by Ed’s partner Frank Villigan, who’s also a caterer and dealer in antiques. There is also a wonderful shop, Lupine Antiques, at the farm. Ed’s studio, classroom and Morning Mist Gallery occupy the century-old barn.

Ed’s favorite painters are realists Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. The best compliment he’s ever received, he says, came from a woman viewing his one-man show at the Watergate Gallery in Washington, D.C., who said, “Your work has the stillness of Hopper.” This, Ed says, reflects his motto:  simplify. He says, “Tell only what you need to tell and enjoy the working process, rather than making everything so exact.” It’s easy to discern that his paintings invite the viewer to imagine “the rest of the story” behind the tranquil pastoral scenes and lush florals.

Ed is best known for his watercolors, but he also works in oils and pastels. He is drawn to the desert southwest in the U.S. – especially the part of New Mexico where Georgia O’Keefe lived and painted – and rural settings like the Loire Valley in France. His work as an artist, combined with his love of travel, has also taken Ed (often with groups of his students) to Romania, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Italy and China.

At least a half-dozen times, he’s been drawn to Giverny, France, the site of the home and famous gardens of Claude Monet, the founder of French impressionist painting. Among Ed’s greatest honors is the fact that his work is displayed in the Atelier Galerie in Giverny.

Along with the magnificent scenery in other countries, Ed loves the interaction with people. Sketching at China’s Great Wall, he attracted the attention of a group of young men and women in military uniform. Without a common language, they managed to share the fact that they all enjoy painting. “Even in a culture so different from that in the West,” he says, “there is a great deal of connection.”

He spends January each year on Isla Mujeres in Mexico, where he has become involved with a group of volunteers at the Little Yellow Schoolhouse, a haven for children with Down’s Syndrome. Next year, they’ll use vibrant sketches Ed has done there as publicity for a school fundraiser.

During his early years in Door County, Ed was a staff member at the Francis Hardy Center for the Arts in Ephraim. Elizabeth Meissner-Gigstead, a fellow staff member and summer intern there in 2004, is now the center’s executive director. “Ed has had a tremendous influence on the arts in Door County,” she says. “He was integral to the Hardy’s Door County Festival of the Arts, which has become an annual August event – now organized by the Sister Bay Advancement Association.”

“Ed is incredibly generous with his talent,” Elizabeth says. “He has donated to special events and continues to participate in our annual Collection Invitational, an exhibit that features the work of Door County’s professional art community. In 2007 he was part of an exhibit that provided a behind-the-scenes look at the working studios of local artists. It was one of the most popular public exhibits we’ve ever organized.”

Ed conducts workshops and classes in his Morning Mist Studio, at the Peninsula School of Art, the Washington Island Art Association and throughout the country, from Florida to California. His work has been shown in locations around the country and is in many corporate and private collections. It can be seen locally in his studio, at Ephraim Clayworks, at DeCor DeJa’ Vu in Egg Harbor and in the permanent collection of the Miller Art Museum at the Sturgeon Bay Public Library. Each February he does a one-man show in Kansas City, and later this year he’ll show paintings at Glas the Green Coffeehouse in Sturgeon Bay.

Ed has won dozens of awards and honors, including one of the Top 100 Artists in the U.S., according to a gallery in La Jolla. The recognition of which he is most proud, however, is being named Door County Master Artist of the Year in 2008 by the Door County Art League (DCAL). “That was an amazing thing,” he says. “When I thought of all the people who have received it, I was just overwhelmed when the call came.”

JoAnne Rosenfeld was vice president of the DCAL in 2008 and chaired the annual juried exhibit and master’s presentation. “Ed’s choice as a master artist embodied what defines the best of Door County art,” she says. “ I was honored to make the selection of Ed as the 2008 Master. Not only is he an incredible artist, he is an extraordinary person and an outstanding representative for Door County throughout the Midwest and the United States and, yes, all over the world.”