Neighborly faces in the works of artist Tom McKinney

There is something familiar about the people in the artwork of Tom McKinney.

The two elderly men pontificating on a stoop could be your uncles. The little girl with bold expressive eyes could be your sister’s child. The elderly woman with a cane could be your teacher grandmother.

The people in his paintings feel like kin, ordinary folks you’d see in your own lives. That seems to be his forte, capturing snapshots of people who look like they’re straight from the neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

So I was surprised a few years ago when I came across several of his works that were different. Two were paintings of birds, another was a dancer and the fourth a little boy picking yellow flowers. The latter, in fact, was the only one that resembled the McKinneys I had always seen. I bought all of the paintings.

Could these be from the earliest period of his artistic life, I wondered.

McKinney is an artist whose prints show up pretty often at auction but not his paintings. I have a few prints that I purchased because the auction house was practically giving them away. Dealers weren’t interested because his works don’t sell for enough money for them to make a sweet profit.

I have a painting of John F. Kennedy and a print of Miles Davis, one of several versions created by McKinney. Like Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett and others, he created prints of his works to make them affordable to the people he chose as subjects. His medium is watercolor, and he does portraits and illustrations.

He paints the young, the old and the in-between. “I love doing old people and young people together,” he said in a video interview two years ago during an exhibit of his watercolors in Bucks County.

Jazz is also a favorite of his and he counted the late great Philadelphia saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. as a friend. McKinney says he plays jazz when he paints.

“I am a big jazz fan,” he says in the interview at the Bucks County Visitor Center. “From the ’40s on up, my dad was a big jazz fan, so I was a jazz fan. So I’ve painted a lot of people like Miles Davis, John Coltrane.”

McKinney has been painting since he was six years old. He would go with his father to the Earle Theater in Philadelphia, which was a hotspot for big-band jazz and other entertainment during the 1930s and 1940s. That’s when he found the inspiration to paint Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and others, he says in the interview.

“I try to portray natural expressions,” he says, “not only in my portraits showing what musicians hear and feel with deft clarity but also portrayals of neighborhood people, especially the elderly and animals.”

McKinney is a realist painter who shows people in their element – whether sitting on a stoop, playing on a Little League baseball field, blowing tunes out of their horns or sitting on a log near a river.

“I love doing people when no one’s around,” he says in the interview. “When you’re by yourself you’re who you really are. As soon as you’re outside, you’re on stage.”

He attended the Hussian School of Art (now Hussian College) in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). He was discharged from the military in 1965 and worked at the Boeing Company as he continued to paint. He left that job to pursue painting full time but found it difficult for the first few years until he met such people as Bill Cosby, he says. McKinney’s paintings could be seen on the walls of the set of “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s, among other TV shows.

McKinney has traveled to Europe, Africa and South America, and some of the images he photographed in those places turned up on his canvases. He was also commissioned to do portraits of Eubie Blake, Miles Davis, and others.

He has also done portraits of African American heroes, including Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and a series on Nelson Mandela before and after he was released from prison in South Africa. “They sold so fast,” he says in the Bucks County interview. His historical portrait of President Barack Obama also sold tremendously well.