Una McCann was born in Redwood City, California, on 15 February 1913, and grew up on the Monterey Peninsula, where she attended public schools. She studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco - later the San Francisco Art Institute - and at the Académie Ranson in Paris. While still a student she painted a large fresco in the school cafeteria, and began the work she is best remembered for. In the mid-1930s she started turning up at the construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Women were not permitted on the site, so she talked her way past the safety inspectors, and kept doing so until she had produced several hundred ink and watercolour sketches of the bridge and the men building it. She got closer to her subject than was sensible. One day she walked a narrow beam between two construction platforms without stopping to think about it. "It was only about 75 or 80 feet down to a roadway full of cars. I looked at the platform ahead of me. Two guys were working on the platform. They sat there frozen. They didn't move. They just looked at me, and I could see what was going through their minds: Is that fool woman going to fall?"
Many of the bridge drawings were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1937, and again at Stanford University's museum in 1986. Done with a light, sure hand, they hold up: a modernist fascination with machinery married to the 1930s reverence for the working man. She met Jack Wilkinson, a painter, at art school in San Francisco. Both won the Phelan Traveling Scholarship - she in 1937 and 1938 - and both were in Europe when war broke out. In 1940 she assisted Diego Rivera on Pan American Unity, the mural he painted in public view on Treasure Island for the Golden Gate International Exposition. She and Jack married in San Francisco on 21 September that year, and completed a mural together in the Burns, Oregon post office in 1941. That same year Jack was appointed to teach at the University of Oregon, following the sudden death of the painter Lance Wood Hart, and they settled in Eugene. Una went on painting there for twenty-seven years, helped establish the Maude Kerns Art Center, and painted the mural in Kaufman's department store downtown. They left Eugene for Louisiana in 1968, where Jack died in 1974. Una moved to Long Island, living at East Hampton and moving in the same circles as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, exhibiting at the Parrish Art Museum in 1981 and the National Academy of Design in 1982. In 1986 she moved to France, to a farmhouse at Segré in the Pays de la Loire, and stayed for twenty-seven years. She was still painting there at ninety-one. "I am painting all the time really. In bad weather I do more still life rather than going outside because it rains so much here, and I can't manage to paint in the rain."
France suited her. "Even people who run grocery stores attend the local art shows." She admired abstraction but had limits, and was funny about them: "I am not particularly interested in exhibitions that concentrate on animals floating in tanks of water or piles of rocks on the floor. I have piles of rocks in my house here and there because I like rocks. To put them in an art gallery is nice for the rocks. But to have a whole exhibition of that kind of thing does not hold my attention."
She exhibited at the Mairie Gallery in Segré in 2011, and died there on 6 March 2013, three weeks after her hundredth birthday. A book of her and Jack's drawings, Jack and Una Wilkinson - Sketchbooks, was published shortly afterwards, and the Schrager & Clarke Gallery in Eugene held a memorial showing of her work that May. She was survived by her daughter Catherine Zerner, her grandchildren Rachel and Charles Theodore, and a great-grandson, Aaron. Sources: askART archives; "Oregon artist dies at 100 in France", Register-Guard, Eugene, 31 March 2013; and a 2004 Register-Guard feature on the Karin Clarke Gallery exhibition. Published accounts date the Rivera collaboration variously to 1936 and 1939; both are wrong. The correction to 1940 is William Maynez's, of the Diego Rivera Mural Project at City College of San Francisco, and is consistent with the Exposition's own dates. [1] | 
1913 - 2013 (100 years)
