Bio

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 paintings are in collections of The MFA, Boston, The Kemper Museum of Art, The Rose Art Museum, The Decordova Museum and many corporate and private colections. She is the recepient of many awards including The Maud Morgan Award, MFA Boston, The Gottlieb Foundation Grant, The Ucross Foundation Residency, The A.R.T. Fund Grant and Mass Cultural Council Grant. Reviews and features have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Art and Antiques, Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Denver Times and others. Solo museum exhibitions at The Kemper Museum of Art, MFA, Boston, San Jose Musem of Art, Knoxville Museum of Art and 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.

Education

1976-1977
The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

1978
BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston MA