Mikki Senkarik

If you didn’t know Mikki Senkarik and her husband Jack White, you’d think they had always had it all. And why not? They live in a beautiful home on an Island off the Gulf coast, they make an excellent living as artists, and they love each other deeply. They are standing on a pinnacle now, but just like everyone else on mountaintops they have had to work hard to get there. Looking at them now, who could guess the tragic circumstances they have faced and overcome?

"I have sold more than 200 originals annually for each of the past twelve years," says Senkarik. "Jack does everything, so I do nothing but paint. I walk to the easel in the morning and just start painting."

Now in her late-40s, Senkarik met White 18 years ago. She attended the Medical College of Georgia, graduating at the top of her class as a medical illustrator. In the 1980s, Senkarik illustrated 47 major medical textbooks and was awarded The Award of Excellence five times in nine years. Her peers bestowed the highest award given in her profession on Mikki.

But personal demons were still dogging her life. She grew up with sexual abuse, successfully battled bladder cancer at the age of 19, and when she met White she was in an eight-year abusive marriage.

Senkarik was displaying her pencil drawings at her first art show when she met Jack, who immediately saw the skill in her artwork but also the pain she was trying to hide. "I was frail and emaciated, carrying 90 pounds on a five-foot eight-inch frame, with black front teeth from where my then-husband had hit me, and I was wearing Coke-bottle glasses. I was nothing to make a man’s head snap." Senkarik remembers. White complimented her on her drawings and he also commented on her condition. His observations hit home. Several months later, Senkarik summoned up the courage to leave her abusive husband and phoned her months-ago acquaintance to tell him the news. Jack and Mikki struck up a friendship that started as an artistic collaboration and blossomed into a romance, then a marriage.

At first, Senkarik focused on her equine paintings, which were beautiful, exquisite works, executed with fine technique and anatomically correct detail. Senkarik did sell quite a few of them, and they were published in every major equine magazine.

Then another potentially tragic event intervened. White was in a car accident that debilitated his painting arm and shoulder. The eternal optimist, he said, "I can either despair and quit, or I can figure out how to paint with my left hand." This was no small matter. White’s paintings, like Senkarik’s, were detailed pieces requiring fine motor control. The day after he returned from the doctors, out came the palette and lefty White began covering canvases with loose splashy color. This was a big departure indeed. After watching the flurry of activity for a while with Jack slapping at the blank canvas, Senkarik interrupted, "Hey, looks to me like you are having too much fun!"

He suggested she try painting some of the California Missions. She was delighted and so were the galleries. The pieces flew off the walls. All the new voice sold before the paint could dry. Thus a new style was born, and she hasn’t looked back. She says with a coy grin, “Had to put the horses to pasture.”

Senkarik believes this day-in-and-day-out discipline of production is one of the biggest keys to her success. She has no problem painting what people want, for she views this as a job — a much more pleasant job than 9 to 5 reporting to someone else. “This is the job I have dreamed of having so why would I complain if it requires work?”

Mikki and Jack don’t buy into gloom-and-doom stuff — they get up and go to work, celebrate their accomplishments and help other people when they can. They are outspoken advocates for victims of abuse, both women and children. "Every day is a good day now," says Mikki. "We are a world of two.""

Carolyn Proeber, Founder and publisher of Art Calendar magazine.