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The establishment of an art gallery here that is worthy of the University of Toronto on the Scarborough Campus is a great joy to me and to everyone within this part of Greater Toronto. That it should carry my name is an honor that is the climax of my professional career. I am full of gratitude to those who chose the name, and happy to give to the gallery a body of work as a start to its permanent collection.
My original ambition to become a professional artist and particularly an interpreter of the Canadian landscape began under the influence of the Group of Seven while I was still in my teens. Later, when I was teaching senior art students, I felt impelled to explore abstraction, minimalism, colour field, and other fashions of the day. My work still reflects some of the disciplines I learned in these exercises. But my inspiration remains the landscape, not what any other artist has said about it.
It is always the natural world around me that drives me to paint. I grew up loving wild country and believing that wilderness was beautiful. My sight is the sense that is strongest and most demanding, but smell is also important to me; the marvelous tang of cold fresh air when I go out into a snowy world, the whiff of wood smoke, the combination of smoke, bacon, feet, and wool that lingers inside every northern village home all excite me. And the smell of oil paints and turpentine is delightful. I react emotionally to the cry of a loon or the shriek of a blue jay or the sound of ice cracking in the sub-zero cold.
I soon learned to broaden my range of enthusiasm and to embrace the works of man. The cluster of high-rise office buildings in Toronto is beautiful in morning light, and farm and village groups tempt me. I travel to rural places in Canada and overseas as well as to the sea, the mountains, the prairies, the badlands, and the high Arctic or Antarctic to get my inspiration and especially to get the detachment from the normal responsibilities and distractions of my daily life in the city.
The sketches, photographs, and memories that I bring back from a painting trip give me material for painting large works in the studio. I plan a large canvas in thin acrylic paint: quick to dry, easy to change. This is the most critical stage. I am creating something that must have a life of its own, able to give its energy back to me. When is this underpainting finished? When I can see on the canvas the pattern, the tones, and even the colours that are right and that make me eager to get on with it in oil paint.
When I have “finished’ the canvas according to the plan I have worked out in my underpainting, I live with it for days and weeks, waiting to be sure that there is nothing bothering me about it, nothing that sticks out and hits me in the eye.
On-location paintings are only finished when I have brought them indoors and lived with them for a while and made the necessary revisions. The pressure of time, the discomfort, and the excitement that are part of outdoor painting prevents completion on the job.
Every painting that I do is done with passion and with love, not only of the subject but of every step in the process. To me the real question is whether it speaks to you, the viewer, and enables you to share that experience.
- Doris McCarthy
Excerpted from the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Everything Which Is Yes
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