“Back to The Garden”

The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin November 2018
Aidan Dunne
The Irish Times
November 13, 2018

Twilight zones: finding a way home through the half-light

Maeve McCarthy’s new paintings are quiet and still, but also evoke restlessness

Maeve McCarthy’s paintings in Back to the Garden are not entirely given over to the garden, though it features large, in a haunted, misty, mysterious way: masses of lush hydrangea blossoms looming out of the damp foggy night, trees against the sky, massed borders of perennials in shade. The first painting in the exhibition is called Abandoned Village, a cluster of low buildings in the distance, again by night – night and twilight are the abiding times throughout all of the work. It’s interesting that the largest pieces in the show, by far, are the close-up, compressed views of blossom in the containment of the garden, while more expansive views, even those evoking immense spaces, are small in scale.

The effect is akin to long shot and close-up, cinematically (McCarthy worked in film animation for a while, and she has made at least one video closely related to her painting), with the close-ups drawing us, even compelling us, into inner, psychological spaces.

The accompanying gallery note puts the work in context, sketching a background story that is something like this: McCarthy is saying goodbye to Brandon, Co Kerry, where she lived for a time. Perhaps it is the abandoned village mentioned. Both her parents died during this period. She returned for a while to her family home, in Glenageary, Co Dublin – a common enough experience, and one with all the strangeness of revisiting a familiar world that has lost its familiar people.

She will be moving on from Glenageary in the not-too-distant future. All of this experience, reflection and anticipation is distilled in the paintings, which are very quiet and still. They express both a state of being detached, at one remove, even a restlessness, but also a profound emotional resonance, and perhaps a desire for home and belonging; varieties of prospect and refuge, in a way.

​The houses we see, handsome terrace dwellings, illuminated in the darkness by the glow of electric light, are inviting, but they also appear vacant, undercutting their welcome, and perfectly embodying the ambivalent, paradoxical inclination to maybe settle – or just to move on.

Pictorially, McCarthy’s viewpoint, and hence ours, is that of an outside observer. Well known as a portrait painter, here she opts not to depict people, but her paintings are clearly about people, about life, and we can easily relate to them via our own experiences. A technically accomplished artist, she favours technique that does not advertise itself, and in this body of work it certainly doesn’t. She sets herself many challenges and more than meets them, all without being showy. But take a moment to consider how well these paintings are made and you will appreciate the exceptional level of her achievement.

RHA Annual Exhibition, 2017

Cristín Leach
The Sunday Times,
June 4th 2017

For a critic who spends the whole year looking at art, the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) annual show can feel like a summer display case of the inevitable and the predictable. [......]

This familiarity can be comforting, even oddly reassuring, when the exhibition is good overall. The RHA annual represents a sum total sample effort by a particular cohort of artists, some established or establishment (including RHA members, who are entitled to exhibit), some invited (en route, presumably, to establishment status), and some accepted through open submission, which this year attracted 2,476 entries from 1,400 artists, from which 321 artworks got in. In such circumstances, what anyone who sees a lot of art on a regular basis is looking for is quite simple: the odd work that stops you in your tracks, standout pieces, surprises.

This year that accolade goes to RHA member Maeve McCarthy, who shows just one painting. In the Garden is a masterful, tall, dark composition in which a mop-head hydrangea lurks in the gloom at night. It’s a brilliantly gothic garden scene in murky green, mouldy white, pale verdure and black. Bravo. McCarthy has found her painterly mojo again after several years of her annual show contributions being competent but ignorable.

Hydrangeas tend to produce a love/hate reaction in Irish people. This Japanese native shrub has long been a low-maintenance favourite for reliably blowsy blooming at Irish farmhouses and cottages. Overtly fancy but practically common, hydrangeas attract near contempt for their ordinary showiness and resilience. They have a novel, possibly once regarded as almost racy, ability to change colour in soils of different pH value, although white varieties do not. In the Garden is part of a body of work connected to McCarthy’s return visits to her grandmother’s home in rural Northern Ireland.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rha-annual-exhibition-royal-hibernian-academy-dublin-2r7dwwm9h

No detour ahead
Brian Fallon 
First published in the Irish Arts Review Vol 32, No 1, 2015​

Maeve McCarthy looked set to become a portrait artist when circumstances intervened and other avenues beckoned, writes Brian Fallon.

Maeve McCarthy’s reputation has been a rather slow growth, but then so, in retrospect, has been her painting career overall. At one stage of it she painted portraits, and the now-familiar one of the late Maeve Binchy in the National Gallery did suggest, quite strongly, that this might be her future ‘line.’ Certain of her contemporaries apparently assumed that it was, and even spoke of her as potentially a prestige portraitist in future RHA exhibitions; she herself, however, saw things differently. The typical ‘image’ for which she is now best known consists of a kind of twilight zone of villages, small towns or, less commonly, isolated houses, seen very much as a night-driver might view them when they show up almost apparitionally under his or her headlights, and then are gone. (In fact her most recent exhibition, at the Catherine Hammond Gallery in Glengariff, was actually entitled ‘Approaching a Village’.)

These houses and buildings are generally depicted in a soft, slightly mysterious focus, which does not dissolve into actual vagueness. Are they intended to look intimate and welcoming, like some childhood or friend’s home, or are they alien and even slightly hostile? The artist herself does not rule out either of these reactions, but prefers to leave it to the individual viewer. Some buildings are shown in darknesss or semi-darkness, others have lighted windows, but as she says, these lit-up ones may be uninhabited. Isolated street lights occur too in the paintings, somehow accentuating the mood of nocturnal loneliness instead of banishing it. Telling little highlights and painterly subtleties keep the paint surfaces alive, rather than blank or inexpressive; the gradations between light, dark and twilight are also sensitively rendered. The scale of these pictures is generally small or smallish, though without being miniature. Instead of oils on canvas, they are usually painted in tempera on board primed with gesso, but of that, more later.

In the RHA exhibition last year, Maeve McCarthy exhibited six paintings, which, significantly, were sold more or less before the official opening (Figs 4&6). Two of these were actually marine pieces, or to be exact, one showed a small fishing craft cresting a dauntingly high wave while the other, by contrast, was a quiet harbour view in dusk. Her studio-cum-base, a rented farmhouse, is virtually at the foot of Mount Brandon, in Kerry, and accordingly she can observe the small pier on the coastline just below, where local craft come and go. These fishing boats, then, are very much part of her immediate environment, though she finds an extra, symbolic element in the tradition that it was from here that St Brendan set out on his great Atlantic voyage. This tradition is, of course, a very powerful one locally and is commemorated every year.

Her exhibitions at the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin had already brought her public notice as an interesting and individual figure in the recent wave of representational art, but with a style and subject matter very much her own. (Aidan Dunne, the respected art critic of the Irish Times, has given her discriminating praise.) She spends part of her time in Kerry and part in South Dublin, where she shares with her brother what had been their parental home, her father, a former ESB engineer aged 92, is now in a nursing home and her mother is recently dead. Driving up and down between these two bases, partly in order to ‘look after my Dad,’ she experiences willy-nilly the kind of visual and emotional sights/sensations embodied in her paintings. (The ‘crossroads at Castlegregory’, for instance, appear by now to mean something intimate and personal to her.) Yet it seems that the origins of such subject matter lie not primarily in the Irish landscape and its roadways but in America, where she has travelled and seen a great deal. In fact, one of her Molesworth Gallery exhibitions was actually entitled ‘Night and Day in America’ (Figs 1&2) and the catalogue carried an evocative foreword by her former partner, Kevin Kiely, a Fulbright Scholar in Literature for 2007-2008.

He recalled her travels in the mid-1990s through the American South-west, where she saw at first hand the kind of territory and landscape evoked in Zane Grey’s novels; Utah, Arizona and (especially) Colorado. This is the region, which, she says, is known to Americans as ‘the Four Corners.’ Not only did she live there for a time, she had her first two exhibitions locally but now tends to brush them aside as rather marginal in her career. It was during this phase that the ‘nocturnal’ basis of her style was largely formed; a much later visit took her through the Mid-West, as far as Idaho, and seemingly gave her many ideas for future works. Edward Hopper had became a strong influence and she makes no secret of it; her more recent and characteristic work, however, is far removed from Hopper’s New England starkness or his sometimes bleak, uncompromising light.

During all this she had kept in close contact with Ireland, and with Dublin in particular. Back home, a spell of working professionally for an animation studio left its mark and sharpened certain of her perceptions, but she continued to paint and won prizes in the RHA exhibitions. She was also a prizewinner in the Arnotts’ National Portrait competitions — now discontinued, and this opened up a possible new field, though a 2002 exhibition at the Frederick Gallery consisted mainly, and rather anti-climactically, of still-lifes. To judge from the catalogue, these (generally small) works were competent but unoriginal, with an occasional flavour of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. A 2006 showing was a much more accomplished and varied affair, with the Hopper influence still evident at times but not dominant; then came the ‘Night and Day’ already mentioned, and in 2010 the show entitled ‘Home’ which established her trade-mark subject matter. In this she appears to have established herself definitively, not only through depicting houses, roads and villages, but in her striking, spare, almost minimalist paintings and drawings of trees. (The Glengariff show included impressive examples of both, along with some big charcoal drawings, and apparently sold well.)

Ultimately, however, the core of Maeve McCarthy’s work does not lie so much in the subjects she paints, or even in her sensitivity to place and atmosphere, as in her perfectionist style and execution. She is an acutely, even obsessively technique-conscious painter, something which, of course, in itself is not a guarantee of creativity, but does at least give proof of genuine dedication. Earlier in her career she worked in oils, sometimes oils on board, but tempera is now, almost exclusively, the medium she employs. In America tempera painters have not been scarce over recent decades; Andrew Wyeth springs to mind straightaway, as do Ben Shahn, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Paul Cadmus. In Ireland, however, genuine tempera-users (excluding Patrick Pye, who belongs to an older generation) are remarkably thin in the ground and virtually the only fellow-practitioner she can call to mind is Joe Dunne (see our feature page 70) whose work she respects. It is a notably demanding medium, better suited on the whole to smallish, precisely-wrought pictures than to big ones.

McCarthy works as a rule on panels primed with gesso, a relatively traditional method (the van Eycks well may have worked that way, though probably adding some kind of oil glaze to a basically tempera body). Gesso, in her experience, is ‘too absorbent’ for oil paints and when combined inexpertly they can create a rather messy sludge, but the drier substance of tempera seems right for her and for her careful, allusive style. She layers the paint carefully, balancing ‘fat’ and ‘lean’, or cold tones against warm, and is very particular about her choice of paints. ‘Fifteen years ago I was experimenting a lot’, she says; however, that phase now seems in the past.

Though highly critical of aspects of her training at the NCAD, back in the 1980s, she remembers with gratitude certain essential skills taught to her by Carey Clarke. However, Maeve McCarthy still feels that the overall climate of that time was definitely against her, although she did have works accepted for two prominent group exhibitions, EVA and the Independent Artists. In retrospect, the freewheeling, slap-it-on modus operandi of the so-called New Expressionism, then dominant virtually everywhere, was deleterious both to her thinking and her working methods. It encouraged her to ‘paint big’ for a time, even when that was not at all her natural inclination. Much more serious in the long term, the absence of genuine guidance left her (and others like her) with little sense of direction or even much self-belief, a predicament which it took decades to overcome; in fact, there were even periods in which she virtually stopped painting.

It is only in her middle years that she has found her own, unique groove and feels at ease inside it. And while she experiences no kinship with conceptualism – or is that phase of art by now played out? – she insists that there is a basic concept underlying what she has achieved, though it is an elusive one to put into words. Tentatively I would suggest the label ‘poetic realism’ or, alternatively, ‘painterly realism’, a term made fashionable in America by Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher and others, but never used here. Is it not about time it was given some real currency in Ireland, which would seen a natural home for the sensibility it evokes?

Brian Fallon is a regular contributor to the Irish Arts Review.

From the IAR Archive
First published in the Irish Arts Review Vol 32, No 1, 2015

Catherine Hammond Gallery, Glengarriff, Co Cork - Sept 2014
John O'Sullivan, Sunday Times ( Irish edition)

RHA Annual Exhibition 2014
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, June 2014

...........................As impressive, though altogether different, is Maeve McCarthy’s nocturnal suite of modestly scaled paintings. They hint at a composite narrative, around the idea of setting off by night from the comfort of home to a stormy sea and they are beautifully, subtly observed. For sale individually (and inexpensively), they look as if they belong together.

RHA Annual Exhibition 2014
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, June 2014

...........................As impressive, though altogether different, is Maeve McCarthy’s nocturnal suite of modestly scaled paintings. They hint at a composite narrative, around the idea of setting off by night from the comfort of home to a stormy sea and they are beautifully, subtly observed. For sale individually (and inexpensively), they look as if they belong together.

Form, farce and faces: the pick of the RHA
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times  Sat, Jun 02, 2012

Realism 

… Maeve McCarthy shows a suite of beautifully elegiac tempera paintings, which take their mood and subject from the title of one of them, Leaving the Village. All feature parts of a small town by night, in the subdued glow of electric light, and there’s an uncanny quietness and a sad, wistful atmosphere to works such as Rural Garda Station (right). All this stems from McCarthy’s close observation and meticulous realism, hallmarks of her work from the first.

She has consistently made portraits, still lifes and landscapes. The latter have tended towards urban or semiurban settings, with a strong feeling of domesticity and habitation, and attentiveness to a sense of place. Although the interior and external spaces are unoccupied, the absent inhabitants are strongly evoked. Suggestions of memory, leaving and longing are usually implicit, as when we recall in great, if selective, detail a place in which we’ve lived or from which we are temporarily removed. In feeling, some of McCarthy’s paintings can recall Eithne Jordan’s understated studies of the urban and rural landscape, in which nothing is exaggerated or contrived.

Maeve McCarthy RHA Home 
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, May 12th, 2010

MAEVE MCCARTHY’S Molesworth Gallery exhibition Home stems from a year spent living in a rented house in a west Kerry townland at the foot of mount Brandon. The two-storey farmhouse reminded her of her grandmother’s ancestral home in Co Down, and set her thinking about the links and overlaps between house and home. That is the basic idea underlying her work. In other words, she didn’t opt to hunt out the picturesque in the natural landscape, as one might expect of a painter visiting Kerry, but concentrated on the homesteads people have made within the landscape.

We don’t see people, and we don’t get to see inside the houses, but the pictures are all about habitation. There is a tremendous sense that the various buildings we see, including the one McCarthy lived in, are preserved with great effort from the depredations of time and the elements. They are islands of comfort, order and clarity.

Sometimes, especially in the more formally composed images, they are quite like sculptures, poised geometric abstractions.

It’s tempting to see these depictions of usually isolated houses, with a strong sense of inner and outer life, personal and public, as symbolic of the individual psyche, and indeed McCarthy acknowledges that in her note detailing the genesis of the show. She is a skilled naturalistic painter, and also a fine portraitist. Her forte is quiet, understated but meticulous observation, delivered with increasingly impressive technique. She simply doesn’t do stylistic flourishes, but give the work time and you will find it absorbing and beautifully made.