“Very strict,” says Janet about her training with Biaxiong, “but it was the kind of  education where in three months I learned everything I needed to know to get a foothold in my art . . .then I just needed to practice.”     

     Biaxiong will teach her to draw, to paint, and to start seeing the world with a renewed sight.  “I’ll look at something and it will just say ‘Okay, I’m a watercolor’ or ‘I’m an oil’ or ‘I’m a pastel,’” says McGahan, flipping through small watercolors of animals that she has done, “the form of something will capture my eye.I like to land on something unusual or maybe kind of quirky.”          

     The profile of an angus cow standing broadside becomes the shape of the state of Montana.  Two horses’ necks entwine like a heart.  Half a dozen chickens glare like jurors from a branch. “I love painting buffalo.” she says of the creature so often painted and photographed. “They are so oddly balanced...their shape is wonderfully peculiar and arty at the same time."            

    These are animals we’ve all seen before, just not quite in this way.  Her artwork relishes in strange, slightly off-kilter renditions of animals often associated with the Wild West, but we see them now caught in humorous poses and dressed in highly unexpected color choices set against minimalist hints of landscape and hovering timeless amid vast stretches of white.  We recognize them, but our vision of them through her paintings has been re-imagined and joyfully tweaked.         

     McGahan taught her children what Biaxiong had taught her: “Drawing is the ticket.  Learn to draw.  Then learn to paint.”  And now that her children are grown she has brought her training overseas to India teaching street children to draw and paint through the Salaam Balaak Trust in Delhi.  She plans on returning to India soon.

--Alex Alviar