Seventy years after beginning a long artistic journey that has taken her — brush in hand — to the high Arctic and Antarctica 12 times, Doris McCarthy “feels great” about the new gallery named for her at U of T at Scarborough that officially opens March 11.
"I never thought there would be a gallery named after me," she says. The Doris McCarthy Gallery’s opening show, which runs until April 25, will feature a collection of her works and isnamed, appropriately enough, Everything Which Is Yes.
Considered one of Canada’s greatest painters, McCarthy is the last surviving student of Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer. "He inspired me to be a great landscape painter of Canada," she says of her mentor. Alongside this renowned assembly of Canadian painters, she helped to interpret the Canadian landscape in a way no other artists had before.
The $1.1-million gallery, situated in the Academic Resource Centre, will permanently house 10 important canvases worth over $200,000 that McCarthy has personally picked and donated. And while landscape painting has not always been considered fashionable, falling out of favour a number of times over the decades with critics and customers alike, this never discouraged McCarthy.
"I experimented with the ‘isms’ of the day," she recalls, "but I recognized that I was never going to be, nor did I want to be, a fashionable painter. I wanted to be good, but I wanted to be good in my own field which was landscape."
Today, wilderness scenes by famous Canadian painters are highly sought after at art auctions and often reach astronomical sums. "I think people are caring more about nature than they once did,"
McCarthy theorizes. "They’re getting out more and looking more and landscape painting is very closely aligned with the love of nature and wilderness."
But decades ago, women were far from accepted in the art community. "There was a strike against you if you were a woman," she says. "You were thought of as a ‘lady painter’ and not taken seriously. I paid no attention. It bothered me but it didn’t stop me."
McCarthy, now 93, admits that it was only as she got more advanced in age and retired from teaching art at Toronto’s Central Technical High School that she began to really get noticed. "I got recognition later in life but I was painting great guns all the time and when I look back on my early work I’m astonished at how good it is. I was elected to the professional societies and so on but there were very few sales and I didn’t have the feeling I have now that I’m a great asset to my gallery."
It’s McCarthy’s continuing and enthusiastic commitment to painting that has made her an extraordinary presence in the art community, according to Professor Dan Donovan of St. Michael’s College, a contemporary art expert who has himself amassed a large collection of modern paintings and sculptures. "Her creative reinterpretation of the tradition of Canadian landscape painting is rooted in, and has clearly added a new chapter to, the story of the Group of Seven."
Along with McCarthy’s art and personal archives, the 1,500 square-foot gallery will administer over 1,300 works by other artists in the UTSC collection while promoting awareness of the visual arts on campus and beyond. The gallery will showcase travelling exhibitions of contemporary Canadian art and act as an educational resource for students enrolled in the arts management, art history and other cultural programs.
"UTSC is honoured to have its gallery bear the name of an artist who is an indomitable example of unstoppable force," said Ann MacDonald, gallery curator. "McCarthy’s unwavering dedication to her own art practice, to the education of other artists and to the encouragement of a supportive arts community continues to make a positive offering to the Canadian art scene."