Biography

Waltraudis Klepal Kennedy was born on August 24, 1926 in Schwerin, Mecklenburg, Germany. She was the only child of Wenzel and Maria Schultz Klepal. When Traudis was three years old, the family moved to the old Hanseatic port city of Rostock, where her mother had relatives. She had a happy childhood until the war. During the war, she was sent to a farm to work, as were most students, taking the place of drafted men. In 1941, her family house on Vogelsangstrasse in Rostock was destroyed by Allied bombing, but her parents survived. Her father was later drafted into the Navy at over sixty years old, and in the last three months of the war, Traudis was drafted into the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force.

Traudis’s family eventually reunited in Rostock. She had hoped to study medicine at the University of Rostock, but her father preferred that she study music. Thus, she majored in musical arts, and in particular the vocal performance of lied, a traditional German type of song. As a student, she visited friends at the Freie Univeristaet in Berlin. After several trips to West Berlin she realized that her monthly trips to the Freie Univeristaet, if the wrong person found out about them, could arouse suspicion. Thus, she told her parents that she had to become a refugee and go to West Germany. On her first night in West Germany, spent at a Youth Hostel, she was advised to go to Wiesbaden, that the headquarters of the American Air Forces in Europe was there and that they were hiring.

There she met Edwin Paul “Ted” Kennedy, Jr., an American historian for the United States Air Forces. They married in Wiesbaden in 1953, and Traudis became a U.S. citizen in 1957.  Over the course of their sixty years of marriage, they would share an itinerant, and as Traudis would often say, lucky life. With two children, they would live in eleven cities, six countries, and on four continents. 

In each new location, Traudis taught German, and at times English. In Washington, D.C. she taught at the Foreign Service Institute, and at one time was a professor of German at Huntington College in Montgomery, Alabama. They were brought to Damascus when Ted joined the United States Information Agency as a Foreign Service Officer. At subsequent posts in Tehran and Yaoundé, Traudis taught at Goethe Institutes. With the help of a scholarship, she continued her study of voice in Wiesbaden, as well as in Cleveland, Ohio. There her mother-in-law persuaded her to continue her music studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music. A year later Ted was offered a unique editing job in Karlsruhe, Germany where he edited a number of monographs written by former Luftwaffe generals and high-level German officers, on subjects chosen by American professors at the Air University.   

It was here in Karlsruhe that Traudis was able to continue her music studies in the Master Class of Bruno Mueller at the Badische Musik Hochschule. In 1956, Traudis began her professional singing career in Brussels, giving concerts across Belgium and Germany, and she performed at Wigmore Hall in London.

When Ted was appointed to the United States Embassy in Yaoundé, Cameroon in 1977, Traudis discovered that it was hard to find a suitable piano, let alone an accompanist. Thus, it was then and there in Cameroon that Traudis decided, and announced to Ted on a memorable day, “Now, I am going to paint.” She began with small drawings of road scenes around Yaoundé and abstractions with geometric shapes. Traudis discovered that she loved to paint, and she would come to feel that “painting was her life”. 

Ted’s continuing career in the Foreign Service would take them from Cameroon to Frankfurt (1979-1982) and Bonn, Germany (1982-1985). Her paintings during this period would reflect the influence and inspiration of the abstract artists of the New York School such as Mark Rothko and Joan Mitchell. Like Joan Mitchell, Traudis was “synesthetic” in that she moved easily from singing to painting. She also experimented with expressive styles and techniques, and pursued expression with color. As reflected on the Exhibitions page, during this period she began exhibiting more regularly in galleries.   

When Ted retired in 1985, they moved to Bethesda, Maryland. Traudis set up a studio and continued her evolution and realization towards what David Galloway (American Editor for Germany of Art in America) dubbed her own “overall” painting style. While in Germany she had exhibited a number of multi-canvas works of atmospheric, cloud-like color forms. Traudis incorporated other materials into her works such as twine, often filling the interstices between the panels with that material to unite the ensemble. In her new Bethesda studio, she could work larger. Intrigued by the surface effects of drawings that her son and fellow artist, James made on heavy aluminum panels, Traudis ordered aluminum powder pigment and began hand-mixing it into a distinctive aluminum oil paint. These paintings are made up of countless coatings. As Traudis layered color and built textured surfaces, often molding on the canvas by hand, she became immersed in the responsiveness of the aluminum paintings to ambient light. These paintings, which Traudis often referred to as simply the “aluminums”, are notable for the way they infuse a space with light and atmosphere. They are spectacular as much for their immediate impact as for the complex vibrancy that the silver layer concurrently reveals and mysteriously veils.

Traudis Kennedy died at the age of 86 in Washington, D.C. on July 29, 2013.