Life

Born and bred in Louisiana, I emigrated to the Midwest shortly before the millennium and have now lived in Michigan for almost twenty-five years. After a couple of decades in which I creatively devoted myself to fiction, I’ve been drawing regularly for over ten years and painting now for over eight.

Work

My interest in drawing rekindled (for various reasons) in autumn 2015; I began doing small drawings and sketches with Uniball Micro Black pens (beloved since childhood) before branching out to larger work, stronger materials (archival ink pens and Canson sketchbooks), and, among other things, Fairy Locks, a webcomic that was long on hiatus but which finally wrapped up at the end of 2019 (best read in tablet mode). A couple of friends and relatives piqued an interest in watercolors, and, having started doing those towards the end of 2017, it took me very little time to roll over to acrylics and eventually oils. Over the past few years, too, I’ve become far more interested in full graphite and charcoal work, as well as nibbling around the edges of printmaking (thus far lino and block). The work featured here is now a fraction of what I’ve done.

Themes

I spent two years drawing online comics and illustrations before I even thought about painting, and much of my work that isn’t landscape or semi-abstract still comes from a similar perspective. Fiction was my primary creative outlet for the two decades beforehand, so narrative—however oblique or shadowed—also comes into play with most of my work. Much of my most recent work takes conventions of landscape and portraiture and twists them a bit—often with reference to myth or folklore—with an eye towards using said conventions to allude to or comment on social situations or issues. In the end, I feel it’s very much up to viewers to make what they will of my work, and I doubt their interpretation is any less valid than my own.

Most of my work takes inspiration from local landscape and society—in my case, Southeast Michigan, both Ann Arbor and Detroit and points in between (Ypsilanti in particular and Hamtramck on occasion). While my paintings, both figurative and semi-abstract, usually reflect the mythic subconscious of my experience and perception, my illustrations tend to be more consciously prosaic, some fantasy images of vanished (?) terrestrial and interstellar situations, but others often directly drawn from observations and experiences from the contemporary Midwest. Each feeds the other, and I’m hoping this tension, if such it is, drives me to better and more meaningful work, fulfilling though my practice has been up to this point. I hope you enjoy it and find something here.

All text and images (c) 2016-2026 by Wendell McKay.