Apart by Choice
Published on Jul 23, 1994
New Brunswick Reader
by R. M. Vaughan
If walls tell stories about the people who live behind them, painter Catharine McAvity’s East Riverside home is an open autobiography of a life surrounded by art and artists.
Hanging side by side with McAvity’s own paintings are works by some of the best and brightest of New Brunswick’s postwar artists—Miller Britain, Julia Crawford, John Hooper, Rosamund Campbell and Jack Humphrey, to name a few. Visitors are immediately struck by the volume and quality of McAvity’s private collection, easily one of the best in the province.
However the difference between McAvity’s collection and those of her Rothesay neighbours is that McAvity’s treasure is not merely the stockpile of a wealthy patron. All of the art was acquired by trade. McAvity describes her relationship with her contemporaries as a kind of bartering system, where appreciation for each other’s work played a more important role than sales.
“In those days people would come by my studio – I called it Red Cloud studio – and say ‘I like that one, I’ll give you one of my paintings or a sculpture’ because back then artists never had any money,” she says. “You have to pass your work around to each other or it might disappear.”
McAvity’s work is in no danger of disappearing. Her paintings are represented in the permanent collections of the New Brunswick Museum, Canada Council Art Band and in the corporate collections of Imperial Oil, Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation and numerous independent companies. Her work has been exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and has toured North America and Europe with the works of other prominent Atlantic Canadians.
The great mystery of McAvity’s career is why, after decades of producing excellent and acclaimed work, she has not acquired the “household name” status of her colleagues, such as Molly Lamb Bobak or Fred Ross. When asked if, like many women painters, she experienced systemic prejudice in bringing her work to the public’s attention, McAvity shies away from politics.
“Everyone is responsible for their own progress and career,” she argues, “and maybe because I’m such a private person, even a recluse, I’ve not done what I could to promote my paintings. But 20 or 30 years ago women weren’t expected to be artists. I think critics and galleries at the time though most of us were just housewives who like to paint on the weekends.”
Her friend, and occasional curator, Prof. William Prouty believes McAvity’s reputation hinges less on her gender than on her garden. “For a long time, Kay decided to do paintings of flowers,” he says. “She made hundreds of beautiful watercolours of flowers in vases and landscapes with flowers. And in the painting world there has been this idea that if one paints flowers one is somehow less ‘serious’ as n artist, that one has become a decorative painter and not a painter connected to the issues of one’s time.”
“Of course,” he adds, “I think this idea is ludicrous.”
The flower paintings are only part of a series of subjects and styles in McAvity’s huge body of work. Working in sects – until I felt I had got my subject and my feeling together perfectly, which is my life goal” – McAvity estimates she has produced more than 3,000 watercolours and several hundred works on canvas. “I love to work on paper,” she says. “it is so immediate, especially with watercolours, where you have one chance to either make it exactly the way you want or to ruin it altogether. With paper, I could always just tear up the painting if I hated it. And I did. I have always been harder on my painting than any critic.” McAvity’s paintings are grouped by her obsessions with particular colors, her mindsets – “I have a bunch of paintings I did one winter I spent alone in my studio, all of them are dark and seem like they are falling off the canvas” – and her travels.
McAvity’s extensive tours of the Caribbean and France resulted in a collection of stunning landscape paintings that are as far removed from the Maritime Realist tradition as New Brunswick is from Antigua or Paris.
There is an other-worldly quality to McAvity’s travel book landscapes that speaks not only to her own sense of distance from her surroundings but also of her individuality in a time when realism dominated Maritime painting.
McAvity’s recreations of island vistas and medieval French villages reduce the shape of the land to single, powerful lines of unusual, abstract colors. A playful surrealist, McAvity dots her landscapes with trees and hills that float in front of the horizon like pallid ghosts, and her skylines are dreamy and filled with bold, sometimes lurid color. Yet underneath the vibrancy and looseness of her canvases lies a tightly controlled brush stroke and a sure, draughtsman’s hand. McAvity’s fluid lines remind the viewer of the delicacy and definition of calligraphy.
Seeing a connection between McAvity’s work and the abstract Expressionist movement, I began to intellectualize over a particular painting. I was quickly corrected.
“I painted what I felt, and also what I was afraid I would miss if I didn’t move quickly,” she explains. “I have never had an art movement or an agenda in my mind.”
“Sometimes a scene would hit me as an arrangement of colors, not a formal ‘landscape’ and I wanted to get that color combination down before the light changed, before everything disappeared.”
McAvity’s haunted landscapes betray psychological concerns that run deeper than mere arrangements of ling and light. Over and over again, McAvity fills her landscapes with round, white shapes that empty their colors into the surroundings. Mountains and oceans, as if she were painting photo negatives of the land. When asked about this recurring theme, McAvity becomes guarded, admitting only that the deaths of her husband and daughter indirectly affected her choices as an artist.
“I have always painted what was inside me,” she says, “and that has made my work extremely personal, maybe even difficult for other people to understand. Perhaps I felt that if I could hold on to anything in the world, it would be my independence as an artist.”
Reflecting on her position in the New Brunswick, and Canadian, art scene, McAvity admits she has remained apart by choice.
“I was never part of any school of painters, and I didn’t feel connected, other than as a friend, to the types paintings that my friends made most of which were figurative and realistic. I had to have an emotional centre to my work that spoke to me first – and technique or style or craft followed emotion.” “Do you think at makes a selfish person?”, she asks.
No, it makes you an artist!