COMM U N I T Y
BY: CHELSEY KRAF T
A
NORMANITE IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Tim Kenney 36 | December 2020
t 52 years old, after 30-years in marketing, Tim Kenney decided it was time for a change. For a more flexible schedule, Kenney began working as a full-time paint contractor when his mom moved in with the family for her last years of life. But, a new career was on the horizon. This new dream would be prompted by a phone call. Kenney’s nephew Bobby Beals, an art dealer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called and asked him to deliver some paintings to Dallas. Among these paintings, one of an aspen tree stood out to Kenney. It reminded him of the trips his family has taken the past 65 years to fly fish in Colorado and New Mexico, surrounded by the same trees. While driving back to Norman after the 9-plus hour drive from Santa Fe to Dallas, Kenney started to wonder if maybe he could become an artist, too. For six weeks, Kenney kept thinking about the possibility. Eventually, he called his nephew and shared his vision before signing up for lessons and giving this dream a go. “I’d wake up thinking about it. I’d go to bed thinking about it. I’d daydream about it while I was working, painting houses, listening to the radio or whatever,” Kenney recalled. “One day I just said, ‘I’m going to do it.’” Twelve years later, Kenney has a thriving art career as an abstract impressionist, painting primarily aspen trees but also flowers and other colorful subjects – ones that are about “the joy and the colors and the beauty” – by using oil on canvas and predominately palette knives. Kenney, originally from Virginia, moved to Norman with his family in the summer of 1970 when he was 14 years old. The next year, Debbie McAuley and her family, also from Virginia, moved to Norman. Kenney and Debbie started dating when they were 15 years old and married on May 27, 1978. The couple has four kids – Tim, William, Kathleen and Suzy – and six grandsons. Both Kenney and McAuley graduated from the University of Oklahoma. He went into sales and marketing and she became a teacher. Once Kenney decided to pursue art, he took lessons with Carol Armstrong at Firehouse Art Center. He walked into his first class armed with a bunch of palette knives, oil paint and a picture of an aspen painting. Despite still having not practiced, Kenney wanted to jump past the basics to learning the techniques for the works he knew he wanted to create. “Carol read me right away,” Kenney said. “She didn’t force me to learn shading. She didn’t force me to learn color. She didn’t force me to do anything. She can read people really well, so she just said ‘Tim, get over there, squirt that paint out, and we’ll get started in just a minute.’”
