Conway artist Bonnie McKay’s earliest memories are of shapes and colors — the iridescent, dancing rainbows in the mussel shells that washed up from the White River when she was a child, the patterns she saw in the stained-glass windows of her church.
McKay catches herself using the word “blessed” a lot and searches for a better word, but she said that describes her life, starting with growing up in Clarendon as an only child.
“I grew up in the Delta. I loved the river; I love the South,” she said. A levee went around the town, and she and her childhood sweetheart would walk the levee, rent a boat for about 25 cents and ride to the sandbar and have a picnic.
That sweetheart is her husband of 55 years, the Rev. Jim McKay, a retired Methodist minister.
“My kids would say, ‘That’s like a storybook,’ and I say, ‘It was back then,’” she said. “I’d walk into town, and the oak trees were so huge they made canopies over the road. All that is instilled and rooted in my heart, so when I paint, that’s there. I just grew up with wonderful people and the cotton fields and all the different feelings of the Delta. I have so many wonderful memories.”
The 74-year-old has been painting or drawing for as long as she can remember. One of her vivid memories is when her fourth-grade class was studying Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, and the teacher asked her to draw something on the board with colored chalk.
“I made Babe the Blue Ox probably 6 feet long,” McKay said. “I was almost running out of chalk.”
The teacher rallied, McKay said, and found enough blue chalk for her to finish Babe and draw Paul Bunyan.
“I was always encouraged by family and friends,” she said.
Her father, Forrest Plumlee, was in law enforcement and became the Monroe County sheriff. A fox hunter, he always sketched pictures of his many dogs, McKay said.
She soaked in the sights and sounds of the outdoors. McKay said she remembers as a child being excited when it rained because that meant mussel shells would wash up from the White River, and the shimmering colors intrigued her.
“The colors would flutter, and my heart would just flutter when I would see that,” she said.
McKay said the ordinary intrigued her, such as someone chopping wood or doing other seemingly mundane activities.
“It still touches me to see the very simple, or the ordinary, and portray that in watercolors or oil,” she said.
McKay went to what was then Arkansas State College-Jonesboro, where she majored in art. She and Jim married before she graduated. He was in the Army and was commissioned to Berlin for three years. They were there when the Berlin Wall went up between East and West Berlin.
“I felt so good and patriotic to be an American; I felt safe,” she said.
They had two of their three children at the time, so her art supplies mostly gathered dust while she took care of her children.
“I would get my paints out and put them up, get them out again and put them up,” she said.
McKay said that after the family left Berlin, her husband went to Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology in Dallas. The couple came back to Arkansas and served churches in Russellville and Fort Smith before they moved in the early 1970s to Conway, where he was director of the Wesley Foundation at the University of Central Arkansas and pastor of Salem United Methodist Church.
That’s when she started giving art lessons in her home, particularly to children.
“I love children. I look at them and think, ‘You may someday be another van Gogh. You may be another Monet,’” she said. “Several of my students have gone on and done well and come back and talked to me later. I’m so passionate about art.
“So many people say they can’t paint, but they can. Sometimes a brush will intimidate some people, but it really is so rewarding to put paint on paper or canvas.”
McKay has introduced people to that pleasure by holding small painting workshops outside in the summers.
Her latest foray is teaching at Art on the Green in Conway, where she also plans to exhibit and sell her art.
“What a wonderful place, Art on the Green, to be able to come and teach and share what I’ve learned through the years. It’s such a joy and a blessing.”
She said the classes, which she teaches twice a week, include a mixture of beginning and more-advanced painters.
“It’s become such a wonderful group — it’s like we care for each other. We always welcome a new student like coming into the family,” she said.
McKay said she also enjoys taking classes herself. She and her husband have traveled since he retired in 2001, and she has participated in workshops and lessons with leading artists. Three places that stand out, McKay said, are the Scottsdale Artists’ School in Arizona, the Fredericksburg Artists’ School in Texas and The Bennington Center for the Arts in Vermont.
She said she has studied under talented artists, including Kevin Macpherson in Taos, New Mexico; Timothy Tyler, an Arkansas native; Peggi Kroll Roberts of Laguna Beach, California; and Matt Smith of Arizona.
“I really feel beyond-measure blessed for having the opportunity to study with these [artists],” she said.
McKay has won several awards for her artwork, but good luck dragging that out of her. The one she’ll hesitantly share is that she received a blue ribbon for her watercolor Reluctant Debutante.
“It was a child in pigtails,” she said, adding that she almost didn’t enter the piece. The judge who chose McKay’s work was Arkansas native Carroll Cloar, which made the award sweeter, McKay said. “It’s always a thrill to me because he painted from memory,” she said. Cloar died in 1993.
“I love painting from memory,” she said. Those pieces are more “ethereal” than her other artwork, she said. The tone of her paintings depends on her subject and mood. “Sometimes I think of my paintings as musical. Do I want the orchestra to be loud or soft?” she said with a laugh.
She doesn’t have a preference for a painting medium as much as she does a place.
“I love to paint plein air — in the open field — that’s my preference,” she said. “There is a freedom there. The light attracts me. I’ve always been attracted by landscapes; it sparks something inside me. Looking at the landscape has given me so much pleasure because there’s so much beauty in simple things.”
McKay said she enjoys painting old plantations she sees, for example.
“I like the forgotten places; I like the back roads,” she said. “I have a respect for the time that was.”
She has painted on the back roads of New Mexico, Colorado and Montana.
McKay said it boggles her mind that people search for places to paint. Arkansas has beauty at every turn, she said, reeling off possibilities, such as cotton fields, the hills, the flatlands, the rivers, the “gorgeous” sunsets — even the bark on a tree. She recalled coming back with her husband from a trip to Vermont, where the foliage was stunning, and when she returned to Arkansas, she noticed the leaves were gorgeous, too.
She mentioned to a woman about how beautiful the Arkansas trees were in a particular spot, and how they rivaled Vermont’s.
“She said, “You know, I’ve never thought of it like that.’ She traveled by it for years,” McKay said, incredulously.
McKay said she can relate to painter Andrew Wyeth’s quote: “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
Last week, McKay started painting a beach series with oils. She has often painted on the beach, especially in Seaside, Florida, where she and her husband started vacationing years ago with friends.
It’s Arkansas, though, that has her allegiance and her heart.
“The sunsets are gorgeous … the countryside, the dogwoods, the trees. I could just go on and on and on and on,” she said.
And she plans to, on canvas.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.