After 30 years of making paintings, local artist Daisy McDonald chuckles about her being "an overnight sensation". Her figurative works are currently in high demand at the Red Door Gallery in North Little Rock, and she was recently chosen to create a larger-than-life portrait of soprano Marjorie Lawrence to benefit the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts.
Daisy McDonald was born in Dallas, Texas as Rose Daisy Brown, named for her mother and her father's mother. She moved to Wichita Falls at age 14 when her father was transferred there, but she already knew that she would never follow in his footsteps of accountancy and taxation.
The arts were in her blood. She had been raised around creative people, particularly from her mother's side of the family. Her mother designed and made clothing; her mother's aunt was a Hollywood character actress. Daisy studied speech and drama at Midwestern University in Texas and attended the Pasadena Playhouse School of Acting in California. She became "Almost Marilyn" when she turned down an opportunity later accepted by an ambitious actress named Norma Jean Baker.
Daisy had a successful career on both the stage and screen as an actress, singer, and dancer prior to taking a desk job with the Dallas Police Department. It was there that she met Nick McDonald, the police officer who captured and arrested the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Daisy and Nick were wed in 1978 and chose Hot Springs as the perfect place to spend their retirement years.
Yet after they moved to the Spa City in 1981, neither husband nor wife ever really retired. Nick gave lectures, participated in a documentary film, and wrote a manuscript entitled Oswald and I. Daisy enrolled in a six-week painting class taught by local artist Otha Blake at "the old YW". Not only was it love at first brush stroke, it became a whole new career for her.
Daisy credits Nick with teaching her about the thoroughbred horse whose substance and beauty lends itself to oil painting. Self-motivated and mostly self-taught, she became an exhibiting member, art instructor, and board president of the Fine Arts Center of Hot Springs. She also performed in plays there and at Pocket Theatre.
Her most notable commissions include a portrait of Hill Wheatley for Juan and Kenneth Wheatley and an Oaklawn racing scene for Virginia Clinton Kelley, a gift from football franchise owner Ralph Wilson, Jr. and Mary McLean. Reflecting on her upcoming commission for The Marjorie Lawrence Project, Daisy says "I have painted portraits and I have painted horses. Now I get to paint a portrait and a horse!"
To prepare for her painting illustrating Miss Lawrence's landmark finale in the Wagner opera Gotterdammerung, the artist is becoming acquainted with the opera star through the autobiography Interrupted Melody. The Texas city girl is finding commonality with the athletic Australian farm girl who arrived in Hot Springs completely paralyzed from polio in 1941.
This commission commemorates the 75th anniversary of that historic horse ride on the Metropolitan Opera stage in New York in 1936. Daisy's artwork will capture that climactic moment when, as the character Brunnhilde, Miss Lawrence kicked her "heels into the horse's flanks and, with right arm extended towards the heavens, galloped into the flames". There will be a public unveiling of the 3'x5' oil painting on Belgian linen at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts.
The Marjorie Lawrence Project is managed by |
