Artist Starts Each Day by Painting Cheery Thoughts on a Clean Slate

Kay Ameche, 86, wakes up every morning and mentally wipes the slate clean. “I usually say the same affirming thing: that this day all things will work for the common good, that it is a new opportunity, and yesterday is a dream and tomorrow is a vision.”

After that she laughs for a full minute and does what she calls a mind-juggling exercise: She counts backward from 100, and then does it again skipping every three numbers.

“Leonardo da Vinci used to count backward from 100 and I thought if he did that then maybe it will help me, and that’s how I start the day,” she said from her home in West Hollywood.

Then she gets down to work. Ameche is an artist. One of her paintings hangs in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Writer Robert Ludlum has one, and so do Katharine Hepburn and George Burns. What is an Ameche? She quotes da Vinci. “Behind the canvas breathes the artist.”

Ameche’s parents were so poor that she was taken out of school at the age of 8 to work to help support the family of 10 children.

“My first job was opening a cigar stand which was located three miles away at the railroad station in my hometown of Edison, Ill. But things got really bad for my father and he needed me and the rest of the kids to help him in his construction business,” she said.

Her father, who never went to school, was also a philosopher. He taught Ameche never to take criticism badly because “it belongs to the person who gave it.”

“He was the original optimist, in a sense, because he knew how damaging negative thinking was.” Even when she was cheated, she recalls, “He told me not to get mad or even feel cheated but to thank God that I’m not the one doing the cheating.”

To her father, she credits the fact that she succeeded at everything she has ever done--especially her art career, which she did not start until age 65.

When Ameche was 15, she announced that she wanted to be a nurse. Everyone except her father told her that her lack of education would make it impossible. She earned her high school diploma at night while attending nursing school during the day.

The family had moved to California by this time and Ameche worked in a series of Hollywood hospitals looking after many celebrities. Through these relationships she explored various secondary careers: actress, theatrical director, radio announcer and promoter for the Dale Carnegie Institute. She also married four times.

But it wasn’t until after she seriously injured her leg and back while trying to prevent a 200-pound patient from falling that she found her calling. She refused to accept that she would have to live the rest of her life in a state of pain. She devised her own prescription of swimming 80 laps a day and using a chinning bar. She put herself in traction by tying a sheet around her ankle, attaching the other end to the piano. She virtually lived on the living room floor in a sleeping bag until she got well.

From this unusual vantage point she noticed how barren her walls were and after she recovered she shopped for art. She wanted a scene of the ocean with a single wave. When she couldn’t find one she decided to paint it herself.

“I don’t know where the talent comes from. But at that time I didn’t know I had any. I thought being an artist was foolish, silly and childlike. But there were some people in my life at that time who thought I was good and they badgered me to paint.

“Then my first two paintings sold for $250 and now when I finish a painting, I just get so sick--because it’s all over,” she says.

Her light-hearted, energetic style has prompted some people to compare her work to that of Grandma Moses. Today an Ameche painting sells for $5,000 to $10,000.

Sometimes, Kay Ameche gives paintings to friends who are sick to cheer them up. “Because I’m satisfied with what God gave me, when I’m alone I don’t feel lonesome,” she says. “I’m grateful for what I have.”