Painter and pen-and-ink artist Kira Mardikes finds inspiration for her works from her work: she grows flowers and vegetables for the Old Alcohol Plant Inn in Port Hadlock.

Mardikes spends most of her days in the gardens surrounding the operation, where she’s one of their two gardeners.

In the lobby just outside the restaurant where her vegetables are plated, her interpretations of the natural world are hung just down the hall from the works of Ansel Adams, whose family built the original alcohol distillery.

Mardikes works three to five days a week, planting starts, weeding, cutting flowers and harvesting herbs and veggies for the Inn and Bayside Housing, the transitional housing center located in the building adjacent to the Inn.

She also has her own gardening projects, such as growing medicinal herbs. All the while, she is taking pictures and drawing sketches of the plants, people, and animals that surround her, to paint later.

“I’m really sensitive and inspired by wherever I’m living,” she said. “And I live in the woods and work on farms and gardens, and that’s what I love to draw.” That world is at the center of her work, usually in the form of the detailed pen and ink drawings that she specializes in, as well as her acrylic, watercolor and mixed media paintings.

So far, her commissioned work includes an acrylic mural on the wood panels of a Finnriver Farm kiosk, pen and ink depictions of estuaries and tree plantings for the North Olympic Salmon Coalition, and a “mandala” of local flora and fauna that was printed on bandanas for sale at the Chimacum Corner Farmstand.

Mardikes studied animation and drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago, home to one of the world’s biggest collections of Impressionist paintings, including those of Claude Monet, perhaps history’s most famous gardener-painter.

Her education at the Art Institute influenced her style as an artist and ability to “put pen to paper quickly and convey meaning.” However, the busy life of a gardener made it easier to stick with drawing comics and, most recently, singular drawings “that hint at narrative.”

After graduating from the Institute, Mardikes felt drawn by her passion for herbs, which had blossomed during her childhood in Portland, Oregon where her mother and grandmother both gardened and made art. Mardikes’ sister was farming at Finnriver, and so Mardikes followed her to the area. She dove into the local farming scene, farming at Finnriver, Willow Wind Farm and Gardens, Friends of the Trees Botanicals, and apprenticing at Mountain Spirit Herbs. Her step-brother, Patrick Ryland, with whom she farmed at Finnriver, introduced her to the Old Alcohol Plant position.

She was enticed by the idea of growing fresh herbs and vegetables and composting on the property of a restaurant, and of the owners’ openness to her ideas.

“They give us a lot of freedom to spearhead our projects and what we grow. It was kind of a perfect fit for us.”

She soon found out about the Inn’s gallery, and was featured in their “Flowers and Food” show with sous-chef Elijah Berry’s oil paintings.

A Perfect Marriage

Her two professions don’t clash, she said. In fact, they complement each other.

“I think it’s the perfect marriage,” she said. “The more I get into gardening, the more I actually enjoy the art process and painting,” she said. “One is really dynamic and interactive, you get to be with people working on a project, and when I do my art I tend to be alone and observing nature.”

Her gardening schedule of three to five days a week doesn’t exhaust her, but inspires her to create art even more, she said.

“It helps keep me active and really observant, whereas art is very reflective and sedentary in a lot of ways, at least the kind that I make,” she said. “So it’s a really great stable rhythm to be in for me as an artist.

She adds that the natural harvesting seasons balance out her career’s seasonality, with the winter months open to create art.

Aside from her main art, Mardikes has gotten into carving wooden bones, and making dyes from the Inn and Bayside’s dye garden. She’s working with the Inn’s staff on planning a community dye class in the near future, and an art show for the fall. Looking toward the future, she hopes to do more collaborative art in the community, and to bring her gardening knowledge and art together.