The cult of Doris

TANNIS TOOHEY/CP (Click for image gallery)

Doris McCarthy turned 100 last week—an achievement the artist’s many friends attribute to the same steely determination that has animated her life. Over those 10 decades, McCarthy has touched thousands as a painter, teacher and mentor of generations of artists. Her greatest life lessons, however, have been through intrepid example: in showing how life can be lived with verve throughout a lifetime and how creativity ripens with age.

Known for her insightful, quick wit and no-nonsense ways, McCarthy is very frail now, confined to bed at Fool’s Paradise, the home she built on five hectares overlooking Lake Ontario near the Scarborough bluffs. “It’s a miracle she made it to 100,” says artist Wendy Wacko, McCarthy’s former student and the producer of the 1983 docudrama Doris McCarthy: Heart of a Painter. “I swear she was holding on just for that.”

Click here for a Doris McCarthy gallery

McCarthy’s centenary is being marked by retrospectives of her 75-year career, prominently Roughing it in the Bush, comprised of 70 works, some never before seen publicly, at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus and the U of T Art Centre downtown. The artist’s long-time Toronto gallery, Wynick/Tuck, is mounting Eight Paintings/Eight Decades, which succinctly captures McCarthy’s broad vocabulary of technique and evolving style.

The constant is landscape, which the Calgary-born artist began depicting as a girl growing up in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood and cottaging in Muskoka. A scholarship student at the Ontario College of Art, McCarthy studied with Group of Seven painters, among them J.E.H. MacDonald and Arthur Lismer, who offered her a teaching job at the Toronto Art Gallery and, after she graduated in 1930, a position at Grip, the advertising agency where many of the group worked. As a woman, she was expected to work for nothing. Having none of that, McCarthy took a position teaching art at Central Technical High School, where her students included Harold Klunder, Murray McLauchlan and Joyce Wieland, who said McCarthy inspired her to become an artist.

The school, like many of the era, prohibited women from teaching after they married. “Doris said she would have happily stopped, but it didn’t happen,” says Lynne Wynick of Wynick/Tuck. Of the great love of her life, the husband of a friend, McCarthy is discreet, though she once told an interviewer she became closer to his widow after he died.

A prolific painter, McCarthy up to the ’70s showed often at galleries attached to department stores, universities and art societies such as the Ontario Society of Artists, of which she became the first female president in 1964. She chose to ignore the discrimination facing women artists, says Wacko: “She thought the best approach was to do the best job you can and don’t waste time whining about it.” McCarthy is not one to mope. When she realized raising a family wasn’t in her future, she forged ahead—teaching, painting and expanding Fool’s Paradise, which she purchased in 1939 and has bequeathed to the Ontario Heritage Foundation for use as an artists’ retreat after her death.

Retirement in 1972 freed her to paint full-time and fulfill her dream of visiting the Arctic, which inspired the famed Iceberg Fantasy series, her first foray into large-format painting. McCarthy’s energy and work ethic was extraordinary, even into her 90s, says Wacko, who accompanied her on annual painting trips to Ireland, the Alberta badlands, and Italy: “We’d be up by six; if we weren’t out by 8:30, she was cranky.” During one trip to Tuscany, Wacko recalls, McCarthy was horrified when Wacko wanted to waste a morning shopping for Italian hand-painted dishes: “We finally had bad weather and she broke down and said ‘okay.’ ”

Often weather was brutal—so cold that when using watercolours, they had to add glycerine to the water to prevent it from freezing. “McCarthy taught me that,” Wacko says. “You don’t learn that in art school.”

McCarthy painted until five years ago, often precariously positioned on a step-ladder, producing what many regard as her finest work in her last decades. When an arthritic finger became bothersome, she had it cut off. As her eyesight diminished, her technique shifted: “It was far more about shape and tone and colour, less about detail,” says Wacko.