FGCU graduate’s island cafe-studio feeds artistic appetite
5 – minute read
Island life has long sparked the imagination of artists. Paul Gaugin, the post-impressionist French painter, became especially famous for depicting the people, nature and the spirituality of Tahiti and other South Pacific islands. The tropical landscapes and seascapes of Key West, the Bahamas and other Caribbean islands inspired American painter Winslow Homer as much as the crashing waves of the Maine coast, where he lived much of his life.
Kate Dupre, who graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University in 2014 with an art degree, feels the same about Mackinac Island.
Growing up, she spent summers on the bridgeless island in Lake Huron between Michigan’s Upper and Lower peninsulas. Her parents ran a seasonal photography business there, then took the family to Florida in winter.
Now, she’s carrying on the family tradition. Since 2019, Dupre has owned and operated a waterfront restaurant and art studio on Mackinac where she teaches classes and paints from May to October each year.
“Growing up living on this island instills creativity in you,” she says. “Two of my best girlfriends here both went into the art field, too. It’s just a place that instills artistic tendencies. It has this gorgeous, natural aspect to it.”
With mainland Michigan about a 15-minute ferry ride away, children among the island’s 500 or so year-round residents grow up biking to their friends’ homes to play, Dupre says. They hike the woods and climb the limestone bluffs of the state park that covers most of the island.
In summertime, residents rub elbows with waves of tourists who swarm the popular destination. More than 1 million people visit the island each year, according to the local tourism bureau — most during the summer. They come to explore the former trading post’s historic forts, savor the sweet scents of the annual Lilac Festival, indulge in pounds of handcrafted fudge and ride horse-drawn carriages on car-free streets. (Emergency vehicles are the only motorized ones allowed.)
“There are a dozen fudge shops here,” Dupre says of the Key West-sized island. “So it smells like fudge and horse manure everywhere you go.”
“Mackinaw,” as the island is pronounced, embodies this old-time charm so effectively that Travel + Leisure magazine readers ranked it No. 1 among the top 15 islands in the continental U.S. this year.
Perched over the island’s harbor, Dupre’s Watercolor Cafe offers these summer visitors sustenance as well as a scenic spot to reflect on the Mackinac magic and express their creativity. They can practice painting, make jewelry and learn other crafts through classes or open studio time with professional artists like Dupre.
“It’s a very special location on top of the water,” she says. “The water here is crystal-clear aqua blue. It never gets higher than 80 degrees here, so it’s just gorgeous.”
The small building housed a coffee shop before Dupre leased it. Although she had worked as a waitress before, she’d never managed a food service operation. Despite her lack of experience, the cafe’s scenic location and breakfast and lunch menu quickly took off and became her business model’s bread and butter. The artistic side of the business, the classes, feed her creative appetite as do the commissions she paints off-season.
“I was at a point where I wasn’t really sure where I was going with my career,” Dupre says. “I was doing a lot of freelancing with graphic design and photography and artwork. I just wanted to challenge myself and also sink some roots into the Mackinac Island area. I had been teaching some painting classes and found how fulfilling that was.”
Ironically, she didn’t study painting at FGCU, focusing instead on graphic design and digital art courses. Professor Michael Salmond recalls Dupre as “one of our best back when digital media design wasn’t even a concentration.” She was one of the students who helped push him toward creating the degree program, he says, which is now part of the Daveler & Kauanui School of Entrepreneurship.
“She wanted a design program that could balance creativity and lead to a job and creative career,” Salmond says. “Kate was a strong, diligent, intelligent and talented student who I knew would do well in whatever she put her mind to. She’s been able to successfully merge her art side with her business and design side to run a successful business.”
And, between the Great Lakes summers and Gulf Coast winters, Dupre enjoys the best of both waterfront worlds. When Watercolor Cafe closes at the end of a busy season of feeding tourists’ and locals’ body and soul, she packs up her paints and heads south. Last winter, she spent the season on another island, Key West.
“I’ve spent two winters here, and it is very, very quiet,” she says, explaining that lake ice prevents ferries from running to Mackinac so most residents travel by airplane. “But it really kind of satisfies the artistic soul.”