PRESS

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.

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

The Return 
Ashford Gallery, Dublin

Aidan Dunne 
The Irish Times, January 26th 2016
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Although Maeve McCarthy is best known for her small-scale paintings, including immensely atmospheric studies of rural locations by night, she turns to drawing for The Return.

The return is her own, from a Kerry village – the setting for most of her recent work – to Dublin and to tending her late mother’s garden in Glenageary. She also revisited the farmhouse near Newry where her grandmother grew up before moving south in the 1920s. The family spent time there every summer.

McCarthy, who has worked in film animation  in Ireland and Germany, travelled north with her brother Peter, a film-maker. The house, long abandoned but still standing, is the setting for the short, meditative film that gives the show its title. Sounds and images gently hint at recollections of lives lived there, losses and departures and the finality of time.

Six large charcoal drawings feature the two family settings, north and south, by night. A mass of hydrangea blossoms glows luminously in the moonlight. In the soft, intricate layering of muted tones, McCarthy creates calm, accommodating spaces that allow for memories and reflection.

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

"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’.)... read more at  http://www.irishartsreview.com/painting-no-detour-ahead

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 2013
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, June 2013

Many of the works that linger in the mind are not the inevitable big showstoppers, of which there are several, but smaller, more muted pieces that catch the corner of your eye and draw you in.

.................................... So too does Maeve McCarthy’s superb sequence of six nighttime views of rural habitation framed by the vast expanses of enfolding landscape and the deep sky. They’re beautifully observed and perfectly judged.

Form, farce and faces: the pick of the RHA

Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times  Sat, Jun 02, 2012

It’s a full house at the RHA Annual Exhibition, with invitations to members cut back to accommodate selections from the record open submission. The result is a vast display and a great show........

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.