Bio

Born and bred in Louisiana, I emigrated to the Midwest at the turn of the century and have now lived in Michigan for over twenty years. After a couple of decades in which I creatively devoted myself to fiction writing, I’ve been drawing regularly for over seven years and painting now for over five.

Work

My interest in drawing rekindled in late autumn of 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 in December 2017, it took me very little time to roll over to acrylics–and eventually oils. The work featured here is a fraction of what I’ve done in the last several years.

Themes

I spent two years on drawing and online comics and illustrations before I even thought about painting, and much of my work that isn’t landscape or abstract still comes from a similar perspective. Given that writing fiction was my primary creative outlet for the two decades beforehand, narrative 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.

All text and images (c) 2016-2023 by Wendell McKay.