Lifetime of artistry

As a young mother, Francine Kuenzli would put the kids to bed and try to snatch a moment to work on her art.

More than half a century later, her kids are long since grown, she’s retired from most other activities, and art no longer has to compete for her time. At 94, Kuenzli paints every day, sometimes twice.

“I think it keeps me alive, really,” said Kuenzli. “It’s always a challenge to see if you can make a better painting or a more interesting painting.”

A stroke about five years ago left her wheelchair-bound, so she had to give up her other love, gardening. But her Costa Mesa home is full of the fruits, or rather blooms, of her labors: Among at least 60 of Kuenzli’s paintings that hang on her walls are many pictures of flowers in vases, often roses she grew herself.

Her paintings represent the life she’s lived — models she painted in art classes, a seaside scene, portraits of her grandson and her live-in caretaker, Doris — and a life she’s imagined, working from pictures — a series of American Indians wearing contemplative looks and feathered headdresses, copies of famous works such as Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises,” the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Now Kuenzli is looking to donate some of her work to a worthy cause. Her home and the homes of her children are full of her paintings, she said, so “I thought I might as well start giving them away. You know, I’m [almost] 95. I can’t take them with me.”

Kuenzli’s own life story presents a colorful picture.

“My family was very poor, and I left home at 16 because I couldn’t find any food in the house,” she said.

After taking a job in downtown Los Angeles, she went without dinner each night to walk five miles to the Otis Art Institute, where she studied portraiture. She had done her first portrait as a teenager in school.

“I did it so well that I thought right then and there that I was going to be a portrait artist,” she said. “But then I realized that without backing, I couldn’t exist.”

Soon Kuenzli met a man and, after knowing each other a week, they married.

He was twice her age, she said, but he was a college graduate who was able to provide for her. The couple had two children. She and her husband eventually divorced, and Kuenzli remarried.

With her second husband, she moved east to Wisconsin, where he ran a restaurant and she taught pastel drawing and painted at night. They had three children. Kuenzli moved to Costa Mesa around 1970.

As her life has changed over the years, Kuenzli’s art has been a constant. She mostly paints with oils, but she’s also tried watercolors, pastels and other media — soft stone carving, charcoal drawings. At age 72, Kuenzli enrolled at Orange Coast College to learn foundry work, and a small sculpture of an American Indian crouched in a ceremonial dance sits on her table as a testament to that endeavor.

One of Kuenzli’s daughters, Cora Bieler, became a watercolor painter after growing up surrounded by art at home. She also runs a business arranging art tours for people who do plein-air painting.

“For all my life, I suppose that’s what I’ve been exposed to, looking at the world from an artist’s point of view,” Bieler said.

But art appreciation was something Bieler said she had to learn. When her mother was taking life drawing classes, it was sometimes awkward for young Cora to see the results.

“It was bad enough that she was doing pictures or paintings with nudes in them, but to bring home friends [when] you’re at that age of embarrassment of 7 or 8,” Bieler said. “After a while you learn that it’s very artistic and learn to appreciate it.”

Kuenzli said she’ll be 95 in February and she’s still learning.

“Everybody has different ideas about getting old, but I think we all ought to be grateful that we’re here to learn,” she said.

And some of her paintings may inspire future learners. Friends of the Costa Mesa Libraries are trying to raise money for a 50,000-square-foot library next to City Hall, and Kuenzli has decided to donate several of her works to hang in that library, whenever it’s built.