Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Colleen Kennedy Premer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Colleen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

With my artistic career (as well as life in general), I do believe that the universe has a plan and the timing is exactly what it should be. I have always been a creative person, guided by visual clues and observation. Early in life, I wanted to be a writer, so I spent much of my teenage years and college training pursuing that vocation. My mom, Elaine Kennedy, was a prolific artist, so I grew up surrounded by her work and a witness to her process. I always felt like she had the role of artist in our family. But behind the scenes, she was always encouraging me to draw and paint and be creative. When I was in my mid twenties, my mom bought me a weekend at a printmaking workshop, and I fell in love with that medium, and felt like I had found my artistic voice. When my mom passed away at a young age, I sensed it was my job to carry on where she had left off. Even though I was a stay at home mom with three boys, I always found time to work on my printmaking. It wasn’t until my youngest son went to college, however, that I jumped into my work with both feet. While technically my work as an artist didn’t really get much traction until I was older, it was a consistent and evolutionary process that brought me to the point were I am today.

Collee , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I have dedicated more than 30 years to the art of printmaking. While my formal education was centered on writing (B.A. – Journalism) and people (M.S. – Clinical Psychology), my passion has always been to make art, and since discovering printmaking in the late 1980’s at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, I have embraced my passion for this process.

Most of my prints take an interesting slant on something familiar, and reinvent those images in a new and unusual way. My icon choices may be either vague or recognizable, yet always subject to personal interpretation by the viewer. My goal is to use color and imagery to generate texture and depth to my work, and the biggest complement I can recieve as an artist is when someone has an emotional reaction while looking at one of my prints. I have found that the power of observation is my most important tool, and it is through my art that thoughts and ideas that I can’t articulate verbally come to life with ink and paper.

This past summer, at the age of 61, I was accepted as a visual artist into the prestigious Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, CA. It was very validating to be able to show my work to the thousands of people who flock to the Festival every summer, and I am proud to share that I have been invited back for the summer of 2024 to share my work again.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is when I create a piece of art that sparks a conversation and a connection with a viewer. There is nothing more validating than when a perfect stranger is moved by something that I made, and like my work enough to want to purchase it and live with it in their home. This is profoundly gratifying and humbling.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I feel like what drives my creative process is the desire to share myself and my emotional journey with others. My inspiration comes from many areas of my life — my dreams, a random thought that resonates with me, or an unusual visual experience that I can’t stop thinking about. I am often drawn to subjects that are unintentionally beautiful, like the deep color of rust on the side of an aging building, or the pattern that the cracks in the sidewalk make that are aesthetically compelling. Art is an expression of the conscious and the unconscious mind.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @colleenpremerart