Cayman Art Week – Art Bus Tour, Part Two

Studios, stories, and the worlds artists build

By Christopher Tobutt

This second installment of the Cayman Art Week Art Bus Tour leaves the timetable behind and steps instead into the inner worlds of the artists themselves — the rooms where clay turns, colours bloom, and imagination becomes something you can stand in front of and feel. These three stops in the eastern districts reveal not just artworks, but sensibilities: three very different ways of seeing Cayman, and seeing beyond it.

Stop 5 — The Visual Arts Society at Watler House, Pedro St. James

The small wooden house at Pedro St. James has the atmosphere of a place long steeped in making. The Visual Arts Society, founded in the 1970s, has always been a crossroads for Cayman’s creative community, and you sense that history the moment you step inside. The air is warm with the scent of clay, and the soft whirr of a potter’s wheel greet you at the door. A ceramicist sits at the wheel, coaxing a vessel upward with the steady, meditative rhythm that pottery demands. Paintings line the walls: seascapes, portraits, abstract bursts of colour. Each one feels like a voice in conversation with the others. What lingers is the sense of community — artists speaking openly about their journeys, their experiments, their missteps, their breakthroughs.

Stop 6 — Ren Seffer’s White Dog Art Studio, Breakers

Ren Seffer’s studio is a burst of colour before you even cross the threshold. Her paintings — large, exuberant, and unmistakably hers — fill the space with a kind of joyful insistence. Cayman’s everyday life becomes something mythic in her hands. Huge tropical leaves seem to dominate her paintings, but then there is flowing water, laughing people, and, of course, dogs a-plently. The tour notes described her work as “colourful and instantly recognisable… capturing Cayman life with humour, charm and imagination,” and that is true — but standing in the studio, you feel the deeper current. Ren’s brushwork is loose yet intentional, playful yet grounded in observation. Her figures tilt and sway with a buoyant rhythm, as though the island’s breeze has found its way into the paint.

Originally from Australia she settled in Cayman in the late 1990s and quickly became a favourite among collectors. Her “White Dog” motif began with Gidget, her first island dog, whose personality sparked an entire series. That lineage of canine muses continues, each one adding its own chapter to her visual storytelling. Ren’s paintings don’t simply depict Cayman; they perform it — its warmth, its humour, its unhurried joy.

Stop 7 — Kay Smith Studio, Breakers

Where Ren Seffer paints the familiar with imaginative flourish and laughter, Kay Smith paints the unfamiliar with startling intimacy and intensity. Her oceanfront studio is a gallery of portals — each painting a doorway into a different world, and walking past her many and varied paintings is a bit like leaving through a National Georgaphic magazine, only with pictures brought to life by the artists eye and paintbrush, rather by the camera lens. A woman in a flowing dress – another in a leather jacket -. A leopard, serious and regal,  stares right at you out of a moonlit jungle. A movie star stares through sunglasses. Divers descend into impossible light. Here’s a picture of a beautiful flamingo. There’s  a picture of God shutting the mouths of the lions in Daniel and the Lions Den. Each picture tells a story – stories of other worlds, other places and other times.

Kay trained originally as a graphic designer in the UK, and that discipline shows in her precision: the crisp edges, the layered textures, the deliberate use of colour. But the emotional charge — the dreamlike quality — is entirely her own. Her work is collected internationally and also shown at The Gallery at the Ritz Carlton, but it is in her Breakers studio, with the sea just beyond the windows, that the paintings feel most alive. The ocean seems to echo the expansiveness of her imagination.

These three stops reveal the breadth of Cayman’s artistic landscape: the communal craft of Watler House, the playful storytelling of Ren Seffer, and the dream world precision of Kay Smith. Three visions, three vocabularies — each expanding what Caymanian art can be.