Catherine McCarthy

Artist Bio Artist Work

Click HERE to read about Upon a Lilac Sea: Paintings by Catherine McCarthy at the San Jose Museum of Art.

Click HERE to read about Catherine McCarthy in the Art Blog HallReady

Evoking a centuries-past sensibility, Catherine McCarthy's passionately rendered yet lyrical images form enigmatic art works that are rich with metaphorical allusions to the artist's life history and personal experiences.

Using universal iconography in her multi-layered works, McCarthy creates a diverse vocabulary to visually chronicle her past. In addition to referencing family snapshots, she borrows freely from art historical sources, quoting Raphael, Piero della Francesca, François Boucher and Antoine Watteau, among others. In her intricate canvases she combines historical, contemporary, sacred, and secular icons that create a narrative complexity.

Calm and turbulent imagery of the sea appears throughout McCarthy's paintings, serving as a powerful and poignant metaphor for the ebb and flow of memories and emotions. Heartney observes: "McCarthy treats each image as a tenuous thread leading back to a hidden universe. She assembles a tapestry of disparate images, not to defeat meaning, but to draw us into her inner world."

- Cathy Kimball

Catherine McCarthy attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford University in England from 1976-1977 and received her B.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1978. Her works have been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.