Doris McCarthy: My Life.

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

When artist Doris McCarthy retired from her long teaching career at Central Technical School in Toronto, she was astonished to discover her best years were still ahead. Now a full-time artist, she learned to make lithographs in Newfoundland, travelled to the Antarctic, saw a retrospective show of her work travel across Canada, became a Member of the Order of Canada, received various honorary degrees, and, at the age of 92, joined an Arctic cruise as a resource person to see Greenland for the first time.

There was little else she had not seen. In several sabbaticals from teaching, she travelled the world to learn of other civilizations and constantly journeyed around Canada to paint. She recorded all in her diary, from which she has extracted a simple and well-told tale of a busy and creative life.

Born in Toronto at a time when Eaton’s delivery vans used horses, she attended art classes while still in high school. A small teaching job, offered by Arthur Lismer, led to her joining the Central Tech staff.

McCarthy writes candidly of gender issues and art politics, and of her private life. There were love affairs with men, one deeply felt, but most important has been the group of women friends with whom she travelled and painted. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, who labelled her desire to buy land for a home her “fool’s paradise” and later withdrew a promised loan to finance it. Yet Fool’s Paradise was built, partly by McCarthy’s hands. She describes it as “the other love of my life.”

Although her reputation rests on her landscape paintings (“always disasters while I am doing them”) she explored many media in the classroom and in freelance work, such as liturgical banners, puppetry, and wood carving. The descriptions of herself at work, particularly in such hostile environments as the Arctic, make the reader aware not only of how an artist sees and thinks, but also of the physical labour entailed in an artistic career.