It’s Never Too Late

Arkansas oil painter Brenda Morgan’s artistic life currently is a tale of two buffalo—or maybe three. “It’s a long, sad story,” she says with a sigh. “The painting I’m working on is actually a replacement for the Woolaroc/Women Artists of the West Invitational Exhibition in May. I had two buffalo that were going to be in it but now I’m basically repainting one of them, painting the same painting. I varnished it, the same way I varnish all my paintings; I’ve used the same varnish for years. I don’t know what happened.”

The varnish, Morgan says, got “a little weird.” When she tried to fix it, she made it worse. “It’s in my living room,” she says. “I guess it’ll live there.

“Things are supposed to happen for a reason, I truly believe that. When I finished the [first] painting, I loved it, but I found myself thinking, I should have done that differently, or I could have done that better. I’m never going to say that again because apparently God heard that and said, ‘Here; go ahead.’ Anyway, it’s going to work. I’ll be a nervous wreck, but it’s going to work.” This is Brenda Morgan, in a nutshell: unflappable, unsinkable, and never without a sense of humor about her life and her art, regardless of the obstacles she encounters.