isn’t it ceramic

Vivid color is the unifying feature of Teri and John Kennady’s Corona del Mar home. Take their contemporary art collection: Although he prefers representational, finely crafted paintings and she likes “tough” pieces with warmth and humor, both are happy with the pieces they’ve used to decorate.

“We work together on the collection,” Teri Kennady says. “We have ‘our’ pieces that we both feel very passionately about, and yet we still have very different tastes.”

It was their mutual love of strong color and whimsy that led them to seek out artist-ceramist Mary Burns of Orange.

“I was eating at the Wolfgang Puck Cafe in South Coast Plaza and saw a large ceramic urn I loved,” says Teri Kennady. “I was told Mary Burns made it.”

Burns, a third-generation Californian, graduated from Cal State Fullerton and did graduate work in art at UC Irvine in the early ‘80s.

“I come from a ceramic technology background and have worked for commercial companies in the past,” Burns says. “I burned out doing that [in ‘86], so I decided to go on my own, since it is hard to be creative when you’re doing production work.”

Burns met Barbara Lazaroff, Wolfgang Puck’s wife and the restaurant chain’s designer, at an art show in Los Angeles in 1990 and was commissioned to create custom ceramics for Lazaroff and Puck’s Malibu restaurant, Granita. She designed large serving platters, a limited amount of dinner plates and dish-specific pieces such as seafood bowls.

Burns has since created ceramics for the couple’s 11 restaurants, including the ones in Fashion Island Newport Beach, South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa and the Irvine Spectrum.

“The work in the Spectrum is really the most indicative of what I can do. It is less utilitarian and more sculptural,” she says. “But all the work I do is created specifically for the individual site.”

She is now designing works for a Spago in Beverly Hills and the Puck Cafe in Disney World in Florida.

All her works are hand-painted with a sumii brush. Some of them sport 14-karat gold paint. “Often I formulate designs as I’m working, except on the large sculptural pieces that I sketch out first because I have to take technical aspects into consideration, like shrinkage of clay and that kind of thing.”

The price of her work--which is by commission only--ranges from $400 for a vase to about $8,000 for a table.

Teri Kennady has one of Burns’ large sculptural pieces in her entry hall--a ceramic table with a glass top. The piece holds another glass sculpture and a massive glass vase filled with dramatic foliage.

Kennady also collects smaller works by Burns, such as three-tiered serving pieces, dishes, bowls and mugs. She places them atop her dramatic glass dining room table by Los Angeles artist Woods Davey. The table looks as if it’s suspended by boulders that start on the floor and rise through the middle of the glass.

The Kennadys also collect art by artists other than Burns and Davey. They began collecting work by California artists in the mid-1980s when the couple were involved with the Laguna Beach Art Museum.

“We liked it because it was so alive and accessible and you could meet the artists and go to their studios,” says Teri Kennady. She continues her interest in contemporary California art as a board member of the new Orange County Museum of Art and through chairing its opening gala Thursday. Burns’ ceramics will serve as centerpieces on each of the 25 tables.

“The new museum site is a renovation of the original building, which will be a wonderful facility to show contemporary California art,” Teri Kennady says. “The new gallery will have the space to show the permanent collection, photography and small prints and glass and ceramics. The sculpture garden will also be enhanced.”

Besides the opening gala, a members’ opening will take place Friday from 7 to 10 p.m. On Jan. 25, the museum will open to the public with a free Community Open House and Family Arts Day from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The museum is at 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Information: (714) 759-1122.