A few months ago, I met and talked with the Artist Laureate of Illinois, Kay Smith. Kay spoke at the exhibition of her watercolor paintings as part of the XVII Biennial International Ernest Hemingway Conference. When I told her I am passionate about the topic of aging and our last third of life, she winked and quickly quipped, “Well, that’s one passion I can help you out with.” She is accomplished, engaging, passionate and a bit sassy. Kay Smith is 93 years old.
At the age of 19, Kay left her Vandalia family farm homestead and moved to the big city. She had some secretarial skills. To her, Chicago was like a candy store. She was sure her father expected her to return with her tail between her legs, but she was determined to make it on her own and she was drawn to classes at the Art Institute. She worked at the Armour stockyards as a stenographer and at Eli Lilly as an illustrator. She has lived Chicago history.
Kay is an artist/historian. In 1971, she started painting The American Legacy Collection, 250 watercolors, which document all phases of American history over 500 years.
“Lincoln worked in our courthouse in Vandalia. He was a son of Illinois,” she noted as we discussed her early years on the farm. “In those days, family history was very important. Older people would sit around, playing cards or making quilts, and they’d just recite their family history. History was alive.”
Kay spoke of the picture of aging she had learned while growing up.
“First, you were not afraid of death,” she observed. “You saw it on the farm all the time — birth and death, life and death. So I never grew up being afraid of death or death for any of my family. And also, old people were respected, they were taken into homes and lived with the family. They babysat or did smaller chores, milking, cooking, I mean it was not a bad place to be. So that’s a pretty good picture of getting old.”
At age 65, Kay started teaching watercolor at the Old Town Triangle Art Center. “I could always find something positive in my students — a perfect line, a fine stroke — but I was always honest because you can’t lie in watercolor.”
She’d tell them, “You know what this lacks? It doesn’t have your heart there.”
Kay added, “I’d teach them how to see, in relationship to painting and drawing. They’d see deeper into things, they’d see more minute things, they’d see the things that make it cosmic, that make it organic, and we need to do that in aging, we need to have a new view of what getting older means.”
In 1997, at 74, Kay contracted Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare but serious autoimmune disorder in which the immune system attacks healthy nerve cells of the peripheral nervous system. This leads to weakness, numbness, and tingling, and can eventually cause paralysis.
“I date my life now, before or after Guillain-Barré,” she explained, as she spoke of her months at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, not knowing if she’d ever paint again. Now, at the age of 93, she says, “It was not a bad experience. I learned so much about the kindness and resilience of people. I was fighting for my life.”
She stopped teaching on her 90th birthday because she wanted to stop “at the top of her game,” and she’d seen colleagues over the years continue their teaching careers after they should have stopped.
Kay Smith is not a gray-haired teenager; she is an example of aging with grace and grit.