Bruce McKay
Growing up in Toronto, I was always drawing. As a little kid, animals were my favourite subject. My parents were very encouraging, and when I was about ten years old they arranged for me to spend time with a wonderful artist named Ralph Abrams. He was a painter, sculptor and animator who was passionate about experimenting with ‘the new’. I would occupy long Saturday afternoons sketching madly at the museum, or sculpting at his studio. Sometimes Ralph and I would just hang out with all the other artists in the building and they would show me how they created their art. Even then, I knew that I was going to make art my career – no, it would be my life.
In my early teens I was accepted into a special high school of the arts in Toronto, where I studied life drawing, colour theory and art history. I was hungry to get as much practical experience with as many different media as I could. By the time I graduated there was nothing I hadn’t tried. But I hadn’t yet found my own individual style. I experimented with everything from photo-realistic wildlife in watercolour, to aggressively expressed abstract oils. I even briefly fell in love with technical illustration. (For an artist, I can be a very rational person, and I enjoyed the precision of it.)
Fresh out of art school, I stepped sideways into advertising. Some 250 local, national and international creative awards later, I rose to the position of Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi, Canada. But the hours were brutal and I regretted every passing day that I arrived home too tired to express myself through my art. Soon it was time to make a dramatic change. So I returned to the easel full time. Eventually, I built my ‘bigcatheads.com’ website as a virtual gallery to display my work. It’s very gratifying to get positive comments from people who live a world away. On any given day, folks from Tokyo, London and Rio drop by my site to look around. For some reason, I have found that my paintings are well appreciated in South America. I suppose it must be the bold, vibrant colours. And best of all, it was my website where Glyn Washington, of Washington Green, discovered my work.
