Self-taught artist Doris Clark has loved drawing and painting since childhood

A drawing by Doris Clark.Give Doris Clark a pencil, and she’ll give you a portrait.

Clark mastered the art of sketching portraits in her teens, but she never had a lesson. Back then, she enjoyed copying pictures of movie stars from magazines, especially actresses. Today, her favorite subjects are her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“I like to draw people in pencil. I like to paint scenery in acrylics and oils,” said Clark, 83, who lives in Madison, Kan.

For the last three or four years she has entered pieces in the Art is Ageless® competition. This year she won the top prize in the drawing category. Her paintings have fared well at the Greenwood County Fair, too, winning grand champion in two recent years.

Clark’s earliest memory of drawing is when she was about 7 years old, growing up in Montgomery, Mich. She also remembers getting a D in art that year, in second grade. “My mother said once that I started to draw as soon as I could hold a pencil in my chubby little fingers,” she said.

As a teenager, Clark became interested in painting, too. She bought her first set of oil paints with money she earned from a paper route, and she didn’t have a clue what to do with them. She was married and had children before she completed her first large painting. It was a scene from a 1960s-era National Geographic magazine photo of a village in Sicily, with the sun shining on the cliffs in the background.

“My oldest daughters can remember when I was painting that,” she said. “I would put it on top of the refrigerator until I was ready to work on it again.”

Today her artwork is on display in the homes of her five children and their families all around the country. Clark’s 7-year-old great-granddaughter recently sat for her first portrait. It took Clark about six hours to draw her, and the result is a family treasure to last a lifetime.

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