“I just enjoy moving paint around,” said Kay Todd about her art, some of which is exhibited on the side of Interstate Gas/Conoco Food Mart.
For many who have developed control over what moves from their heads through their hands to paper or canvas, art is a way of dealing with life. Todd was raised in a less-than-affluent home and art was an escape. 
“I could arrange a painting when I couldn’t arrange life,” she said. “It was a way of building an alternate life.”
The replica of T-shirts sold in Brian and Trish Richmond’s store came about after Todd painted a mural on the wall of their son Landon’s room and one on the door of the bar at their cabin. They were impressed with those and asked if she could “blow customers away” with her rendition of that saying in a much larger form. As well, hidden in the mural is “LOR,” young Landon’s initials.

In 2007, Todd and husband, Lynn, built a house not far from the former Hubbard’s Cupboard in the Laramie Peak/Black Mountain area. Todd has her own wonderful, light-filled art studio.
“I wasn’t going there if there wasn’t a studio for me,” she said about what became their home. As for what comes first — cleaning or art — she continued, “If the house needs vacuuming, it will need it again in a day or two. I spend time doing art, which will be different each time I go to it.”
When the house needed a paint job, Todd made a deal with neighbor Jim O’Brien. He’d paint the house from the high-reach and she’d do a painting of his dog Mutt. Both were well-served in the deal.
Art even entered Todd’s classroom at West Elementary where she helped students who had trouble with reading. 
“After reading a story, I would have them draw a picture that they saw in what they’d just read — but they had to put themselves in it, figure how they would have worked in the plot,” Todd said.
Through what they drew, she was able to ascertain whether or not the students understood what they had read.
Todd has been a part of the Wheatland Art Guild for many years. Her name is listed with those of many other Wheatland artists on most of the murals that adorn buildings around town — the 4-H Building, the north side of The Gym, the south side of Frontier Furniture, Bank of the West, Platte County Memorial Hospital, the little park behind Wheatland Area Development and the east side of Emporium Hair Salon on East Gilchrist.