A Lesson in Perspective

Longtime children’s art teacher Judy McKinney now offers lessons to fellow residents at Holiday Cowhorn Creek Estates
By Ellen Orr

Photo by chloe sanders.

When Judy McKinney’s eldest grandchild, Katie, asked her for help with drawing a snout, Judy pulled scrap paper and a pencil from her apron pocket and got to work. Standing behind her seated granddaughter, then age six, Judy studied the object of the piece—a small stuffed animal —and drew the shapes of the animal’s three-dimensional nose. “Katie looked at my sketch and said, ‘Mimi, that’s wrong. You’re up there. I’m down here.’ So I had to get down, get my eyes on her level, and then sketch it again.”

This anecdote encapsulates one of Judy’s greatest gifts as an artist, a teacher, and a person: she values varied perspectives. She believes that people of all ages, educational levels, and backgrounds have unique insights and lessons she can learn, as long as she is open to them.

As a child, Judy attended Liberty-Eylau School District, where she became one of the (if not the) district’s first-ever National Merit Scholarship finalists. “I was a tomboy who turned into a nerd,” Judy said. “I was the one people came to when they needed help with their homework, when there was a concept they couldn’t get from the teacher, and I could always explain it. So the teaching thing—that goes way back.”

Many people in Judy’s life encouraged her not to waste her exceptional intellect and academic potential. She knew there would be no waste: she said she was going to raise brilliant children. “My doctor just said, ‘You’ve got the brains—you need to go to medical school,’” Judy recalled. “And I said, ‘Think about it this way: I’ll raise children and ‘multiply’ myself in the world.’ And that’s exactly what I did.”

Judy and her husband, Bill, met when Judy was 18 and Bill was 22. They met by happenstance through mutual friends one Friday night and spent the rest of the weekend together. “Our chemistry was just incredible,” Judy said. “By Sunday night, we were trying to figure out how to tell our families that we were getting married.” The following Wednesday, Bill asked for Judy’s father’s blessing. The two were married five months later, “as soon as we could get the budget to balance,” she recalled.

Kids soon followed, and before long, Judy was a 27-year-old stay-at-home parent with three children under the age of five. One day, a friend invited Judy to join a weekly tole painting class. (“Tole painting” is the folk art of painting on everyday household items.) “You didn’t have to do any kind of drawing,” she said. “There were books, and you traced things onto recipe boxes, lap desks, plaques for the wall.” Judy, who had always been intimidated by drawing, decided to give tole painting a shot.

The second class, scheduled to fall on July 4th, was canceled, and in the intervening two weeks between Judy’s first class and the next, she practiced every day on her own. She had unlocked a hidden talent, and she was hooked.

Word of Judy’s abilities spread, and commission requests came flooding in. As the asks became more and more detailed, Judy was pushed to grow and improve. She purchased “how to draw” books on various subjects and found that a step-by-step method made sense to her. The more she practiced, the more easily she could derive the steps herself. Bill taught her how to perform reductions and enlargements, a skill he had learned in a woodworking course, enabling Judy to paint her images onto objects of all sizes.

The owner of a children’s dress shop in Hooks, after seeing one of Judy’s works in the wild, started stocking Judy’s pieces in her store and acting as a go-between for customers who wanted custom pieces. After a lucrative Christmas season, she urged Judy to try painting on canvas. One landscape on canvas later, Judy began to see herself as a formal artist.

In her early 30s, Judy was asked to visit the school to teach an art lesson to one of her children’s classes. In preparation, she chose an image for the class to recreate and then broke it into shapes that she knew the kids could handle. “‘Can you draw a letter C? Can you draw a letter U? Can you turn it upside down?’ And I went through eight basic shapes, and [the students] agreed, ‘Yeah, we can do that,’” Judy remembered. The class was a huge hit, with all of the students completing a piece they were proud of. Other teachers took notice and asked Judy to visit their classes as well, until one teacher finally asked, “Why aren’t you teaching [private] art lessons?”

At her home on Kennedy Lane, Judy began offering after-school classes, using the step-by-step method to empower children as capable artists. At “Studio 2211” (in reference to her house number), Judy taught countless artists over a 40-year career. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Judy retired—or so she thought.

In early 2023, Judy began experiencing severe mobility issues. She lived alone—as she had for the last three decades, since her husband’s untimely death—so her adult children, none of whom were living in Texarkana, began looking into places for her to move nearer to them. And then, the burglary happened.

One summer night, with Judy asleep in her bed, someone broke into her home, stole her purse and car keys, which they used to steal her car. The police told Judy that the perpetrator had likely been watching her for weeks through her always-open blinds and that she needed to keep them closed. “Once I lowered the blinds, it was like, ‘Oh, get me out of here,’” she recalled. “It didn’t even feel like the same house.”

Though her children—living in Austin, San Marcos, and Denver—lobbied for her to move to one of their cities, Judy had her mind set on Holiday Cowhorn Creek Estates. She had visited the property multiple times with her garden club and to visit friends who were residents. She felt confident that she could be happy there.

In July 2023, her eldest, Donna, flew in from Colorado to get Judy moved and unpacked. Once settled in, Judy made it her mission to get to know as many fellow residents as she could. “I decided I wouldn’t be happy eating dinner in a dining room full of strangers every day, so I started learning people’s names on purpose,” she said. “It became a hobby. I now know 70 or 75 names.”

By September, the activities director convinced Judy to teach a seasonal class for interested residents. After a month of painting pumpkins, Judy’s new students experienced the same epiphany Judy herself had experienced 50 years prior: they could make art.

“They started telling each other, ‘Oh, you can do it; the way she teaches it, you can do it,’” Judy said. “It just took off from there.”

Now Judy offers regular lessons for her fellow residents. Her third-floor corner apartment, in addition to her living spaces, boasts a large room, with windows overlooking woods and the creek, which serves as her studio.

photo by chloe sanders.

Though her Kennedy Lane house, where she lived for 50 years, will always hold a piece of her heart, Judy says she loves living at Cowhorn Creek. When she is not teaching classes or creating art of her own, she can be found spending time with her neighbors-turned-friends, reading, and participating in her book club. She especially loves visits from her children (Donna Souder Hodge, PhD.; Mac McKinney; and Tommy McKinney) and grandchildren (Jack, Chloe, Katie, and Lily), all of whom inspire great pride—and from whom Judy loves to learn.

“When Tommy [my youngest child] was still a toddler, he was my best critic,” Judy recalled. “He would look at my work and give his opinion, and it would really help me because he would notice things that I might not have noticed.” 

Now, Tommy’s daughter Lily (13) is the youngest McKinney, and she too inspires her Mimi artistically. “Lily draws this little dinosaur, with his hand sticking up and jagged teeth on both edges,” Judy described with a smile. “I can see her making it into a cartoon.”