1940

1961

1973

1983

Margaret Wynnfred was born in 1917 as the second daughter of the Williams family from Hilo, Hawaii. She was born without her left hand and forearm which from the start probably made her more determined to achieve her goals and be the best at anything that she would set her mind to. And her overwhelming interest was art. When she was a toddler she was drawing with pencils and luckily her parents acknowledged her talent and encouraged her.
She was given the nickname Garé - which is some sort of abbreviation for Margaret and actually pronounced more like Gary - in school because the class already had another Margaret present.
As a teenager she earned herself a reputation as being a good artist and she even helped her architect father with drafting work.

In 1936 Garé graduated from the local art school with distinction. She then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in order to attend the prestigeous Vesper George School of Art where she often worked until the small hours of the night. She was soon spotted as one of the most talented students ever there and her hard work got her into Who's Who in the World in 1941.
After her graduation in June of the same year Garé returned to Hawaii only to experience the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor half a year later. This incident brought USA into World War 2 and the inhabitants of Hawaii were encouraged to move to the mainland. The Williams family followed suit and settled in San Jacinto, California, where Garé divided her time between family chores and her floral paintings that were already beginning to make her famous.

One day Garé saw a newspaper article about a nearby chicken farmer who dabbled with the drawing of some comic books and she went out there to see if he might have any work for her. Little did she know that she met her future husband that day because the farmer was Carl Barks. But he did not have any work for her and that was that. For the time being...

After spending the remaining war years as a draftsman for the McDonnell Douglas aircraft company Garé continued her painting at the family's house. She had married years earlier but that ended in a painful divorce. However, in 1952 everything seemed to brighten up as she happened to meet Carl Barks again. By coincidence he visited a country art show of which Garé was in charge and they got to talking.
After two failed marriages Barks had finally found a woman who understood him and appreciated his work and they began dating. But on their second night out they were in a car accident which injured Garé's back and forced her into reconvalescens for several months. Extremely bad luck but somehow it turned out to be somewhat of a blessing after all. From the bed Garé was unable to pursue her career as a painter and Barks suggested that she could help him with his work instead.
She was willing and in all the years until the retirement in 1966 she faithfully and tirelessly did all all the tideous and dull chores that her husband detested; filling large black areas with ink, lettering and inking many backgrounds in the splash panels. And she was so devoted that she more or less sacrificed her own promising painting career which slowed down to a minimum.

The couple was married in Reno, Nevada, in 1954 and by that time Garé had realized that instead of painting tropical floral arrangements she preferred the painting of landscapes i.e. forests, mountains, lakes and rivers through the different seasons of the year. She participated in a multitude of art shows up through the sixties and won several prestigeous prizes for her eminent work.
Garé learned new aspects of the trade all the time. Her many forest paintings for example clearly reflects her understanding of varying use of colours, and light and dark effects. Many a day her husband drove her to the nearby Californian woods where she could draw countless sketches to be used later in her compostions back in the studio.

Garé was now so esteemed in art circles that her work began to appear on Christmas postcards from the Leanin' Tree company, and this line of work paramounted in 1991 when her painting Mountain Laurel Time was chosen in competition with 2,500 contestants as the one supplied to the American troops in the ongoing Gulf War in Iraq. Many of the paintings are nowadays on display in the Leanin' Tree Museum of Western Art in Boulder, Colorado.

From the early 1980s Garé experienced growing health problems but she was still working long hours at her beloved easel almost every day. The couple had only a few friends as right from their joint start they had decided to devote themselves to their work. And they stuck to the initial decision and worked to the end bringing unspeakable joy to countless thousands of art lovers.

Garé died on March 10th, 1993. She is buried next to her husband at Hillcrest Memorial Cemetery in Grants Pass, Oregon. (See HERE).