Current Conversations: Anne Harris & Kevin Paulsen
Join Anne Harris and Kevin Paulsen at The Urban Electric Co. for a conversation on craftsmanship, materials and thoughtfully made design.
Event Details
Step inside the world of craftsmanship and contemporary design with Anne Harris and Kevin Paulsen for a conversation at The Urban Electric Co. Explore the intersection of making, materials, entrepreneurship, and the enduring appeal of thoughtfully crafted objects. Set within the creative atmosphere of the The Urban Electric Co. showroom, this conversation offers a behind-the-scenes look at the ideas and artistry illuminating today’s design landscape.
Speakers
Anne Harris has had 30 years of professional experience as a muralist and color consultant who marries design and a traditional painter’s aesthetic. Her practice draws from a multitude of styles spanning not only the globe but the history of art, ranging from Pompeii to Picasso. Anne’s honed understanding of style and color, as well as her fluency in a wide range of historical styles and techniques, produces work with long-lasting significance and creative integrity that stands the test of time. Her projects have been featured in House and Garden, Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, The New York Times and The Current and can be found throughout the U.S. and Europe.
Kevin Paulsen’s murals look as if they have always been there. Painted in the manner of the itinerant artists who once traveled New England decorating early American homes, they carry cracks, combed patterns, and sepia-touched greens that suggest the passage of centuries, yet they belong entirely to the present.
Raised outside Kansas City, Paulsen trained as a fine artist at the Kansas City Art Institute. His real education in decorative painting began on Nantucket, where he arrived in 1983 planning to stay one summer and remained some 20 years. He moved from house painting into restoration and decorative work, and alongside Sandi Holland of Nantucket House Antiques and Interior Design, he studied the authentic methods of early 19th-century itinerant painters such as Rufus Porter and John Avery. Nantucket House has long represented his paintings and murals, and the island is also where he met his longtime collaborator, David Wiggins.
Since the late 1990s, Paulsen has painted from a top-floor studio in a former department store on Wall Street in Kingston, New York, balancing commissions with his own projects. His murals fill dining rooms and restaurants across the country, and his work has appeared in the Fifth Avenue windows of Bergdorf Goodman and in House Beautiful, Traditional Home, and Architectural Digest. He also helped found Kingston’s O+ Festival.
Paulsen describes his work as pulling tradition into the contemporary, moving from realism into fantasy and from light into dark, always responsive to its setting and grounded in authenticity. Follow Paulsen on Instgram at @KMartinPaulsen