Name Arthur McKay | ||
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Arthur Fortescue McKay (September 26, 1926 – August 3, 2000) was a Canadian painter best known as Art McKay, a member of The Regina Five.
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Art McKay was born in Nipawin, Saskatchewan. His father was Joseph Fortescue McKay, a son of Angus McKay whose own grandfather was the younger John Richards McKay and whose grandmother was Harriet Ballenden. This and other ancestry would qualify Art McKay as an Anglo-Métis artist in Saskatchewan and in Canada. Art's mother, Georgina Agnes Newnham, was a daughter of another historical figure in Saskatchewan, that being the Anglican Bishop of Saskatchewan, Jervois Newnham.
McKay studied at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary, Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris (1949–50), and Columbia University n New York, and The Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Between 1955 and 1967, McKay rose to national and international prominence with the painting group The Regina Five. He was influenced in the 1960s by Barnett Newman., who he and Roy Kiyooka invited to the Emma Lake Artists' Workshop as guest artist. McKay is most noted for his scraped enamel "mandalas" which utilize circular and rectangular formats to create highly contemplative images reflecting his interest in Zen Buddhism. McKay was included in Clement Greenberg's 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition. In the 1970s, he continued to paint abstractions but also reintroduced the landscape in his work.
During his life as an artist, Art McKay struggled with serious personal difficulties, such as sever depression.
In 1997, the MacKenzie Art Gallery mounted a national traveling exhibition, Arthur F. McKay: A Critical Retrospective. At the exhibition opening, McKay said: "If I had known I was that good, I would have painted more."
McKay died on August 3, 2000 in Squamish, British Columbia at the age of 73.