Doris McCarthy: My Life

by Doris McCarthy

A wonderfully frank look at a life lived within beauty and without regret. McCarthy’s sense of artistry, transmitted over a sixty-year painting career, celebrates multiple beauties of everyday life.

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Cathy]

Beloved Canadian, Doris McCarthy, was a tour de force, an artist, a teacher, a world traveler, a devoted friend, colleague, and proud homeowner in a time when women just did not own homes or drive or go their own way, single, driven, passionate with the keenest eye for form and colour. An outstanding landscape artist, McCarthy learned with the greats-Group of Seven-and many others, and lived in nature at her Fool's Paradise in the Bellamy Ravine on top of the Scarbourough Bluffs and a trio of cottages on Georgian Bay. This book is so absorbing, dear, clear and resonates especially with those of us who live in Scarborough all our lives and who have walked the Doris McCarthy Trail in joy, fancying we see what she saw, and, indeed we have. To think this book ends when she is about 96. She lived another 4 years, still painting. Remarkable.
Her keen humour, self-effacing by turns but determined by half, the power she had over her paint box and the ends she went to in search of bergs-Antarctic and the high Arctic-and art history-Greece, the desert, the tropics-simply breathtaking and it all shines through this well crafted remembrance from her earliest years-1910-makes us breathless with the variety of art forms she pursued all her life. Among her many delights--receiving the Order of Canada for her contribution to Canadian art. A wonderful book to celebrate a life well lived.

[Beaglenose]

What a life she led! To be able to completely devote oneself to your passion is such a rare thing these days. I enjoyed this very much, but know I could never liv that way.