For so many creatives, the road to finding our most expressive medium is almost never a straight line. And sometimes it takes finding one kind to find another one—intertwined with and guided by life’s serendipitous twists and turns.
Clementine Cavanagh knows a thing or two about that. “I first started doing illustrations and textile designs in my early college years and my mother was an interior designer,” she remembers. “I painted custom fabrics for her clients and did screen printing for her during the early years of my marriage.” Decades later, when she and her husband J bought an abandoned 1700s home on the Kennebec River in Phippsburg at auction and took up the Herculean task of rebuilding, renovating, and refurbishing it, she turned again to art—this time with the idea of selling a few paintings to help finance the massive undertaking.
“I come from a family that loves old houses, and we knew this would be a lot of work,” she says. “Selling my artwork was a way I thought I could provide an income stream for the house—so I could redecorate rooms,” she says. “It felt very fulfilling to do that. My creativity was also allowing me to express my own creativity in my house.” Now, she has an in-home artist’s studio and a successful art business—online and in national galleries.
The aesthetics of both her art and interior design work, though, have influenced each other from the very first day she and J first moved into the home with their three children.
“It was the day before Thanksgiving of 2021,” she remembers, after they’d all lived in adjacent housing up on the hill for more than two years as the couple and contractors labored to make the place livable. “We still weren’t finished, but there was finally working electricity and water, and the kitchen and the primary bathroom were done. So, we were cozy.”
As the rest of the home’s work evolved in stages—finishing the kids’ rooms, tending to places that hadn’t been painted yet, walls that needed repair work, and ceilings that needed patchwork—Clementine continued her artwork. Her art studio, for example, came to life when she and J converted a corner bedroom on the southeast side of the house into a throughway. “Otherwise, there was no way to get from the kids’ side to our side where they use our bathroom and our laundry rooms there,”she says. “So, it’s a very active space.”
And in the paintings, she works on there, as well as the house, she strategically uses color to create a mood. And often one inspires the other. “Sometimes I’ll look at a painting of mine and think, maybe I should paint this room that color green,” she says. “Or maybe I should reupholster the couch in that color.” And it can’t be just any hue. In one bathroom, for example, she spent untold hours poring over shades of green until she found just the one. “I always take so long picking paint colors,” she laughs. “But when I found the right color I used it on the molding, the walls—everything.”
And nor is it color alone. “I definitely get a lot of the themes in my art from textiles in the house,” she says. And ideas for both art and the home come from everyday experiences and memories. “They’re interchangeable,” she says. My work is full of figures and moments of leisure or celebration,” she says. “It’s very much inspired by my life in my house and interiors. It’s moments of joy and calm, or sometimes quiet and calm.”
