Dwight “Kuimeaux” Drennan was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1950. He lived there until 1965 when the family moved to Haskell in Saline County when he was in the 9th grade. He finished high school at nearby Harmony Grove School in 1968. Two years later he moved back to Little Rock to attend the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he completed a BA in Political Science with a History minor.
His heart was set on going into politics when he started college, but that changed in his senior year when he decided to pursue his other great passion, art. He took some art courses and, encouraged by one of his art instructors, embarked on a career as an artist.
For the next few years Kuimeaux made art, supporting himself by working odd jobs. By 1975, his desire to travel and see other parts of the South led to him to pack up and head south, to New Orleans. He stopped in Monroe and loved the country and land, so decided to stay. It was friends in New Iberia in southern Louisiana, however, who gave him the name “Kuimeaux” (spelled in the Cajun-French patois and pronounced KEE-mo).
Kuimeaux would live in Monroe for the next 10 years in a house near Bayou DeSiard. He supported himself working at Johnny’s Pizza House, where he originated Dr. Kuimeaux’s World Famous Secret Recipe Sweet Tea. The tea became so popular that Johnny’s began advertising it in the local newspaper, running an ad that Kuimeaux designed, with the tag line: “Put the South in your Mouth.”
Monroe proved to be fertile ground for Kuimeaux’s art. It was there that he first painted what would become one of his favorite subjects – Delta landscapes. Monroe is also where he cultivated his first garden of exotic plants, creating a veritable jungle in his front yard. He would create similar wild, jungle-like gardens at every place he lived for the rest of his life. These gardens became subjects of many of his paintings and drawings.
Kuimeaux’s time in Monroe came to a tragic and abrupt end in 1984 when a fire at his home destroyed much of his work. The fire also took the lives of his two beloved dogs and he narrowly escaped with his own life. Needing the support of his family to regain his footing and start over, Kuimeaux moved back to Little Rock where he lived for nine years until taking the job of caretaker at an old lake house estate at Bearskin Lake, a cypress-lined oxbow lake southeast of Little Rock.
He lived in a small guest house at the estate and spent his days gardening, keeping up the grounds and making art. He loved the solitude and natural beauty of the lake and surrounding land of the Arkansas Delta. An Artist’s Statement he wrote in 2000 eloquently describes how life there inspired him and his art.
The Bearskin Lake estate was sold in the early 2000s, forcing Kuimeaux to relocate. He lived at a couple of different places over the next few years before settling in Sherwood near Little Rock to be closer to his family. There he lived the rest of his life, continuing to make art until his death in 2022 at age 72.
Though commercial success eluded him, he did enjoy significant recognition of his work early in his career. He was selected three times for the annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center (now Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) and had work exhibited at numerous art fairs and festivals in Louisiana and Arkansas. He had one-artist exhibitions at Rountree Gallery, Monroe and the Arkansas Arts Council, Little Rock, and later in his career, one at Arkansas Art Gallery, North Little Rock, Arkansas in 2006, which would be his last.