Celebrating life: The art of Doris McCarthy

McCarthy, Doris

McMichael Canadian Art Collection

Doris McCarthy is one of Canada’s foremost landscape painters, a dynamic woman whose career spans fifty years of Canadian art history. As a student in Toronto in the 1920’s, she was tutored by Group of Seven members Arthur Lismer, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and others; as a teacher, she inspired a generation of younger artists, among them Joyce Wieland. This captivating memoir of her early years is the first installment of her warm and intimate biography. It describes the fortunes of an artist striving to establish herself in the art world of the thirties and forties and the odyssey of a spirited girl searching for her own path to fulfillment. Against the backdrop of those eventful decades, she writes of studying art in pre-war London, winning a teaching position in the depths of the Depression and roughing it on painting expeditions to northern Ontario, the Maritimes and the Rockies. She tells of her personal life: of breaking loose from a disapproving mother, building her own home on the bluffs above Lake Ontario, and of finding love in unexpected places. Written with disarming candour and wit, and drawing on the diary she has kept since childhood, her story illuminates timeless themes: the youthful longing for independence, the nature of friendships between girls and women, the exhilaration of artistic creation, and the irresistible pull of nature and the Canadian landscape. A Fool in Paradise charms and enthralls with its unforgettable portrait of a young woman in search of herself. The Good Wine, An Artist Comes of Age, delivered the next stage of her life from the age of 40 from 1950 to 1991. It recounts her year of full-time painting in Europe; encounters with Dorothy Sayers and Arnold Toynbee; friendships with Bora Laskin and Boyd Neel. The second installment of her biography is as enchanting as the first.

A Fool in Paradise: An Artist's Early Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

MacFarlane, Walter & Ross

Doris McCarthy, whose extraordinary career embraces more than half a century of Canadian art history, won glowing reviews for the first installment of her warm and intimate autobiography, A Fool in Paradise, the book that recounted her growth as a woman and artist. It marked a new departure for women’s autobiography: Elspeth Cameron, writing in Saturday Night magazine called it “a book so direct and simple it seems almost to invent its form.” The Toronto Star declared it a work of “great fascination, deserving a permanent place on the shelf of Canadian artists memoirs.” Books in Canada echoed countless others: “it makes one yearn for more.”The Good Wine describes her life from 1950 to 1991. At age forty, she broke free of her teaching responsibilities to take a year’s sabbatical in Europe as a full-time painter. It was the first of many adventures in the wider world that included a solitary round-the- world odyssey from Japan to Australia, India to the Middle East. She discovered the Arctic and in 1991, Antarctica, drawing inspiration for her art and her life in the far-flung corners she visited and in the beloved landscape of her own country.Encounters with Dorothy Sayers and Arnold Toynbee, friendships with Bora Laskin and Boyd Neel, politics and controversies within the fledgling Canadian art community, the painful losses and unexpected victories of later life — all colour this account of four decades that saw her recognized as one of Canada’s foremost landscape painters. Doris McCarthy’s vibrant, creative energy, her intense and hard-won independence, the great strength she found in love and friendships make this second volume of her memoirs as enchanting as the first.

The good wine: An artist comes of age

The Good Wine: An Artist Comes of Age

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

At 94, Doris McCarthy remains one of Canada's great living artists, prolific in her output. With a special passion for the Canadian landscape, she carries on the tradition of the Group of Seven. An avid traveller, who taught art for forty years, Doris paints with a joyful energy that often feels unparalleled. This latest memoir, filled with colour and black &amp; white photographs, and the artist's paintings, focuses on her 92nd summer. Her ritual of summers spent at her cottage on Georgian Bay is evoked through her recollections of rich days of painting interspersed with visits from friends, and her approach to life and the world around her. The reader comes to understand why she has become a living legend and one of Canada’s greatest treasures. Full of images of her work, as well as photographs of Doris, her home, and friends and colleagues, Doris McCarthy: Ninety Years Wise is an extraordinary window on this remarkable life.

Doris McCarthy: Ninety Years Wise

Humor & Entertainment

Second Story Press

Doris McCarthy: My Life is a wonderfully frank look at a life lived within beauty and without regret. McCarthy's sense of artistry, transmitted over a sixty-year painting career, celebrates multiple beauties—of nature, of relationships, and of everyday life. Still, McCarthy encountered difficulties along the way, including an estrangement from her mother, a painful affair with a married man, and long years of working overtime to fulfill her dreams. This memoir marries the best of McCarthy's previous writings with exciting new material and traces a compelling woman’s life from energetic early girlhood to reflective old age.

Doris McCarthy: My Life

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