Mom's Paintings

As a young girl in Detroit, Michigan Marianna Sinclair had a knack for drawing and sketching everything from family members to country scenes and the dark sooty streets of the Motor City. She felt her best art training was from Cass Tech High School and the Art School of Society of Arts And Crafts, which she attended on a scholarship. In 1942 she worked for Jam Handy Movie Company, coloring animation cells for wartime training films. The following year she was a technical illustrator at General Motors, creating drawings of antiaircraft guns and quartermaster manuals.

The family moved to Portland, Oregon in 1944, and Marianna put her skills to work for House and Leland Advertising Agency, illustrating food, people, and products for billboards. She met my dad (Ty Kearney) in 1946 on a climb of Mt. Jefferson in the Oregon Cascades, and continued to work at commercial art through 1948. That year she was employed by Photo Arts, hand coloring giant black and white photo murals. Once married she no longer worked at art jobs, but continued to paint watercolors and sketch many of our family mountain adventures. Dad's photography and mom's surreal and candid paintings of the outdoors have inspired my photography for three decades.