Biography: Barry Kent MacKay

Barry has completed thousands of paintings or drawings. He has painted birds from all over the world, with special emphasis on North and Central and South America, including the West Indies and the Galapagos Islands, as well as the birds of southern Africa, eastern Asia and Europe. Barry says, “I don’t restrict myself just to species I have seen in the wild, not entirely, and I don’t entirely restrict myself to birds. At one time or another I’ve done abstracts, portraits, still-lives, landscapes, nudes, cartoons and so on, plus numerous other wildlife species, but I have always been mostly focused on birds and frustrated that a lifetime only provides enough time to scrape the surface of what I want to do. I feel it is like trying to do justice to Mount Everest by focusing on a single pebble or two from one of its ledges.”

Barry celebrates the innate beauty of birds and nature: “I’m enchanted by the form of birds. I think artistically, the forms, the curves, the counter-curves of a bird are quite beautiful. I feel that about fish or mammals or plants too. Nature produces an infinite amount of abstract forms from the shape and look of a galaxy to a grain of sand. If you isolate something from its environment, and think of it as a free-formed piece of art without knowing what its function is, it is still something that is beautiful as I perceive beauty, an entirely subjective evaluation. Function drives form in a way that seems to be aesthetically pleasing to us and it is that that is manifested more in birds. Birds captured me first.”

Among his influences, Barry counts such great bird artists as Allan Brooks and his genius at invoking the sense of the bird’s environment, the more realist paintings of Luis Fuertes, the quite stylized paintings of Francis Lee Jacques, and the works of artists who also played a significant role in conservation, namely Roger Tory Peterson and Peter Scott. His artistic mentors were Roger Tory Peterson and, most particularly, T.M. Shortt, who he considers to be Canada’s most accomplished bird artist. Shortt worked at the Royal Ontario Museum, and Barry was about nine when he first met him and was introduced to the methodologies of bird illustration, from field sketches and art materials to use of preserved museum specimens and reference photos.

Barry is originally from Markham, Ontario, where he now lives and has lived most of his life, with some time spent in early childhood in California, and some in Toronto. When he was three years old he started drawing birds; his first bird was a kingfisher, done in wax crayons on the back of a bed tray, but identifiable, and kept by his family until it faded into oblivion. Some of the intimate knowledge he needed to paint realistic birds came from his growing up in a household filled with injured or orphaned birds. His mother, Phyllis MacKay, was an indefatigable pioneer in bird and small mammal rescue and rehabilitation.

The Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) newsletter reports that: “Barry MacKay and his mother Phyllis were among the first to recognize that the tall buildings being constructed in Toronto would pose a major threat to migratory birds.” They first learned of the problem of night-migrating birds hitting lit structures since the late 1950s but “had no idea how many birds were affected by this phenomenon until they began visiting the CFTO tower built in Agincourt in the early ’60s. To their horror they discovered that huge numbers would hit the tower, especially on bad-weather nights, and up to a third of them were still living. Phyllis MacKay, who had always done whatever she could for injured animals, now began to focus on the rehabilitation of these songbirds. And together with her son [Barry] she began making nightly forays downtown when the Toronto Dominion Centre was built in 1967.” [note 2]

This rich experience in bird rescue and rehabilitation had profound effects on Barry’s art and views of animals and nature. Doing bird rescue gave Barry an intimate knowledge of birds he felt he needed as an artist. Barry says, “holding them and examining them, at the same time keeping them in captivity when they needed help and couldn’t be released immediately …all of that made me interested in the bird as an individual and not as an abstract design but something warm and real and alive that I cared about…. Doing the bird rescue work I realized these birds had individual personalities and had an interest in living the same way I did.”