Artist in the House

A creator and collector, Kjell Flanagan surrounds herself with objects that speak to her.

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Kjell Flanagan’s Baton Rouge house is a visual and tactile feast, with interesting furniture, art, and tchotchkes arranged in tableaux.

“I’m three-dimensional,” she said during a recent visit. “I’ve always tried to get texture and movement into my work. I cannot make a two-dimensional painting look alive. They’re dead.”

Her 3D work, namely painted furniture and ceramics, can be found in every room. Much of the art she and her late husband Pat collected also goes beyond the traditional two-dimensional painting. 

Kjell (pronounced Chell) said she realized how tactile she was while studying ceramics at LSU. “We were supposed to do a sketch of our planned work. I’d have to make a maquette [small-scale model] first and then draw that.” 

Her painted furniture features multiple layers of bold colors applied between bouts of sanding, resulting in a high gloss.

At first she merely refinished furniture that had seen better days, hauling it home and making it prettier. The first piece she refinished upon moving to Baton Rouge, a small cabinet, is in her dining room. “I was always on a budget,” she said. “I started with furniture because it was affordable. It was a way to furnish the house. But it had to be a bit strange.

“I’m three-dimensional,” she said.  “I’ve always tried to get texture and movement into my work. I cannot make a two-dimensional painting look alive. They’re dead.”

“When Pat and I were first married in 1982, we lived in a little apartment in Capital Heights. I’d drag in furniture and paint it in the kitchen. Pat was horrified. But he knew I was kind of weird, and we were only there a year.”

She found chairs and chests at antiques and junk stores—and occasionally discarded on the street. “Every now and then I went to estate sales. I was always stopping and looking. 

“I’d refinish old nasty furniture, leaving it brown. In 1983, I started adding color.” 

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Her leap into color and whimsical creative touches was inspired by a trip to her native Miami. “I was visiting my folks and went to an exhibit of furniture. I realized form does not have to follow function. Why can’t a bowling ball be a table leg? I just started going crazy.” 

After painting and sanding, she applied whimsical touches, such as high-heeled shoes to the front legs of small chairs in a series she called “Sophisticated Ladies.” 

“They were very polite little perch-on chairs. I found the shoes at Hobby Lobby, little high-heeled plastic shoes you’d use for decorating at a bridal shower. I added paint and glitter.”

An exhibit of her furniture in the mid-1980s attracted attention, and she started taking commissions.  

“A young woman who was pregnant with her first child commissioned me to paint a chiffarobe and a chest of drawers. I copied her fabric, a plaid in pastel colors. The inside of the chiffarobe door had people’s heights written on it. I didn’t want to paint over that. It had to be varnished and left as is. I wrote around the sides of the piece, ‘This above all, to thine own self be true.’”

“Just because it used to be a fur coat doesn’t mean that it can’t upholster a chair.” 

Clients Barbara and Pat Bacot commissioned several pieces and introduced her to the owners of a Natchez bed-and-breakfast that now has a space furnished with her creations, known as the Mardi Gras Room. 

“The furniture was all mismatched, so I painted it purple, green, and gold with touches of black. 

“But I did more pieces out of my own head than commissions. With commissions, you have to get into someone else’s head. When they say ‘teal,’ are they seeing the same color I see?”

These days she paints furniture only for herself. A pair of needlepoint-covered armchairs from a junk store in Denham Springs is a recent project. 

“The mahogany legs were scratched, so I chalk-painted them to match the blue-gray corduroy on the backs of the chairs and added a riot of colorful flowers.”

She was drawn to the chairs, she said, by the needlepoint fabric. “I like things that hands have touched.”

But she’s never hesitated to use nontraditional fabric. “Just because it used to be a fur coat doesn’t mean that it can’t upholster a chair.” 

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Eventually, she switched from furniture to clay. Years of painting and sanding—not to mention hauling—took a toll on her back and knees. 

“I started weaning off furniture after redoing my dining-room table and six chairs put me in the chiropractor’s office.” 

In 2002, she decided to give ceramics a try and signed up for an LSU Union Leisure Class in tile-making. 

“I took another course in throwing on a wheel and a third class in hand-building pots. I realized I couldn’t learn enough from Leisure classes. I had to enroll at LSU. 

“I’d take labs, not a single class in art history. I had to present a body of work at the end of each semester. I had a clay studio way across campus from the art building. Ceramics and sculpture were considered dirty. We made a mess.” 

Her LSU studies came to a halt when Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. “I was in my third semester. I dropped out of school because we had a houseful of people who were refugees from the storm.”

“My dad taught me to squint when I look at a piece of furniture. That way you can see its shape. That’s where the soul of the piece is."

She still works in clay, either in her garage or in a shared studio space downtown. For the past decade, she had been creating “face jugs,” wheel-thrown ceramic vessels with hand-built features. “I push and shove the clay,” she said. “I have to get my hands up inside the piece.”

Why faces? “It’s just instinct,” said Kjell. “I don’t understand people. I’m totally confused by them. I think I’m happily plodding along and then everything goes the other way. If I can figure out expressions, maybe I’ll have a clue. 

“Most of my faces look bemused, like, ‘Something’s going on here. I’ll just be pleasant.’ They’re either flat happy or confused. They’re all self portraits.

“In my very first Leisure class, I was carving faces on the tiles. It was in me, and it just came out. Later, in a class at LSU, we were assigned to make a set of four cups and saucers. I made face cups.”

[Read this: Figurative sculptor Becky Gottsegen explores time’s effect on the human form.]

The second of four children and the only girl, Kjell grew up with parents who loved Mid-Century Modern furniture. “My folks were Midwesterners, raised around Scandinavian people. Knoll was their favorite.”

She credits her late father with teaching her how to really look at things, which has affected the variety of art she creates and collects. “My dad taught me to squint when I look at a piece of furniture. That way you can see its shape. That’s where the soul of the piece is.

“I still have a table base my dad did, a knockoff of a Noguchi, painted in primary colors. He was an engineer.”

Her dad also gave her the name she said is pronounced Chell. “Lots of people say ‘Shell,’ but I pronounce it ‘Chell’ because that’s how my parents pronounced it. My dad named me after his best friend, whose middle name was Kjell. It’s Norwegian and Swedish, a man’s name.”

Among the artists whose work she collects are former LSU professor Gregory Elliott and the late Robert Hausey, whose large female nude hangs in her kitchen room.

A tabletop tableau features a mixed-media piece by Elliott, featuring clasped hands, red hearts, and yellow stars. Below, she placed a vase from Pier One. “You know it when you see it,” said Kjell of finding the right objects. “Red and yellow make me happy.”

She often finds herself acquiring things with a common color scheme. “Right now I’m picking up fabrics in red and green—an old piece of barkcloth, needlepoint, Chinese silks, whatever—and tossing them in a closet. Eventually they’ll be a room. It may be a bathroom, because I have enough barkcloth to make a shower curtain.”

Sometimes she finds a piece that is perfect as is. “This Louis Philippe bookcase [may] become a linen closet in my bathroom. I removed the doors and shelves so I could sand the shelves and put wood filler in them. I may decorate them, but I won’t paint the bookcase because Cuban mahogany is rare.”

Whether she’s altering a piece or leaving it alone, her mantra is the same: “Furniture is fun. A house should be fun.”  

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.

This article originally appeared in the February 2019 issue. Subscribe to our print edition here.