Rochester resident Kenna Fosnacht was acting on a whim when she applied to the Chateau d'Orquevaux Artist Residency in France a little over a year ago. The residency, based in a historic chateau in rural France, aims to establish an international environment where artists of all mediums can explore their art and share ideas. “The Chateau d'Orquevaux Artist Residency emphasizes the human experience and the creative process.
The residency creates an environment for the artist in their quest for personal growth and artistic expression — while reinforcing that the end product is not necessarily the principal focus,” the program states on its website. “I read the mission and thought, ‘I really resonate with what they’re doing. It’s so beautiful.
I would love to create here,’” Fosnacht said of the residency program. Fosnacht began painting with watercolor at the age of 10, when she came across her father’s old art supplies and a sketchbook of his paintings from a Centralia College course. “I just fell in love with the medium then and there,” she said.
Inspired by her childhood in Rochester, where she played along the Chehalis River and Scatter Creek, saw the salmon runs and collected mushrooms in the forests, Fosnacht sought a career in conservation and environmental science and centered her art around nature. “I’m very passionate about inspiring people to be connected with nature and discovering that magic in nature, and also seeing things with a childlike wonder,” Fosnacht said. The Chateau d'Orquevaux Artist Residency’s acceptance rate is just 20%, with applicants coming from over 120 countries around the world.
After eight months or so without hearing back from the program, Fosnacht figured she hadn’t been accepted. “I just kind of figured, ‘Well, I guess this just wasn’t the right opportunity,” Fosnacht said. “But then one day, I opened my email and I had this acceptance letter sitting in my inbox, and I had one of those moments where you’re just screaming and dancing around your bedroom, because it felt so surreal.
” In mid-July of 2024, roughly nine months after she received that acceptance letter, Fosnacht joined 24 other artists from around the world for a two-week stay at Chateau d'Orquevaux. “I’m not a full-time artist, but creativity has always been a driving force and something very important in my life, so it was just amazing to think that here I am, from Rochester, a smaller town in Washington, and yet I was creating with artists from all over the world, in France. I was very honored to have the experience,” Fosnacht said.
The program purposefully had very little structure, allowing the residents plenty of free time to explore the chateau grounds, interact with other residents and create. “There was no work or grocery store trips or bills to pay. You just didn’t have to worry about those things for this time, where you could just be whatever creative spirit you wanted to be,” Fosnacht said.
Fosnacht didn’t decide ahead of time what she wanted to create during her residency, she said. “I just knew that I wanted to reconnect with the medium of watercolor and push myself further.” She took daily walks around the grounds for artistic inspiration, but said it wasn’t until she started mingling with the other artists and getting feedback from them that she truly found inspiration, she said.
“It was an amazing environment where everybody was both validating each other and pushing each other to reach new heights,” Fosnacht said. After completing the residency and taking another week abroad to fulfill a lifelong dream of backpacking in Switzerland, Fosnacht returned home to Rochester with a newfound confidence in herself as an artist and a desire to encourage other local artists to continue creating and to share their work. “Artists, musicians, writers, poets, you have something important to express to the world, and you don’t know where it can take you if you don’t try,” she said.
For more information about the Chateau d'Orquevaux Artist Residency, visit https://www.chateauorquevaux.com/ .
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