28.10.12 10:16 AM

Mikki Senkarik, American painter, was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee when her father was working on the Manhattan project. Later her family moved to Florida where she grew up with pet cats and dogs. At nine she used babysitting money to buy her first horse. The orange groves were an ideal place to ride, which she did almost every day. She continued to own and raise horses until she switched to painting in oils. Mikki and her mate decided to travel and live where people go on vacations, living in the most beautiful places in the country. This made taking the horses impossible. She donated her registered Arabian to a needy young horse lover. They lived on three different Hawaiian Islands, Las Vegas, Longboat Key, Cocoa Beach, Myrtle Beach, Carefree, Carmel, San Diego and in many other wonderful locations. Now Senkarik owns two black shelter cats. Sisters the rescue shelter said no one wanted.

They sit on her taboret as she paints and garden with her in the yard each morning. Senkarik knows how important pets are to their owners. She has extra incentive to make sure her portraits not only capture the likeness, but the personality of the pet. Senkarik graduated from the Medical College of Georgia and illustrated 47 major medical textbooks in the following nine years. Five of those years her peers voted her the Award of Excellence, an outstanding honor in her field. In 1990 Senkarik turned her talent and draftsmanship to painting in oils. By 1992 Senkarik was established as one of the top selling artists in the competitive Santa Fe art market. She repeated the process in Scottsdale, Carmel and the Napa Valley. Today her traditional oils are featured in Santa Fe, Colorado Springs, Taos and Fredericksburg. After one of her Team Senkarik Members lost a special pet they asked Senkarik to paint a posthumous portrait of their dog. When the painting was delivered the client called with tears of joy saying, “I can’t stop looking at Scrubby. You captured the mischievousness in his eyes perfectly”. That response told Mikki of the need for people wanting portraits of special pets to hold them in their memory