Maclaren Art Centre

 

On July 7, 2010, Doris McCarthy turns 100 years old. In honor of this revered Canadian artist, we are delighted to share a few gifts she made to the MacLaren back in 2003.

 

A longtime owner of cottages on Georgian Bay and a longer time resident of her cherished Fool’s Paradise in Scarborough, McCarthy surely thought of Barrie as gateway city to the North from which she drew so much of the imagery for her paintings. It is therefore appropriate that the MacLaren received five of her little-known landscape abstractions of the 1960s.

 

McCarthy’s friend, Hillsdale artist Marlene Hilton Moore, recalls: “When Doris spoke to me about her hard-edge paintings, she commented, ‘As a teacher, I could not teach something I do not understand.’ With customary discipline she devoted considerable time investigating design, rhythm, and shape. She distilled, sliced and diced, stripping the forms of nature down to elemental designs and crisp surface facets. When she eventually retired, Doris loved April best for painting, a no-nonsense month when the landscape shows its structural bones. I suspect this was a result of her previous hard-edge investigations. One sees in her later works how sparely she painted her ode to realism.”