Landscapes like Poems

The Telegraph Journal
Published on Oct 23, 2010
by Kate Wallace

‘Colour of the Seasons,’ a retrospective of the late Cathanne McAvity’s work at the New Brunswick Museum, show late-blooming painter was more than just a ‘Rothesay artist.’

The New Brunswick Museum helped reignite Catharine McAvity’s creative spark in the 1960s, so it is appropriate The Colour of the Seasons, a retrospective of the late New Brunswick painter’s work, launches there Thursday. It’s a shame McAvity, who died in 1999, won’t be there to enjoy the exhibition, which will include a catalogue and opening remarks by Marc Mayer, director of the National Gallery of Canada.

A middle-class lady who put her painting aside in the 1930s to raise a family, “my mother was really a frustrated artist as a young person,” John McAvity says from Ottawa, where he is executive director and CEO of the Canadian Museums Association.

Any early signs of talent, any artistic ambitions in women of that era, “that was all to be put on hold until they did their duty as mother and chatelaine of the home,” Ian Lumsden, who curated the show, says from Fredericton.

More than 20 years would elapse before the house-wife in Rothesay, a genteel enclave of Saint John, returned to the art she pursued on the sly as a student at Mount Allison University, where her parents insisted she enroll in secretarial school.

In nearly 50 works from the early 1960s, when McAvity returned to painting, until 1990, when she stopped, the one-woman show charts her evolution from middle-aged floral watercolorist to a dedicated artist of landscapes and abstracts.

Her son hopes the exhibition dispels some lingering ideas about his mother’s work.

“She always bristled at being called a `Rothesay artist’” he says, its connotation of upper-class dilettantism.

Despite her late start, McAvity hit many of the milestones of a professional career: solo shows at the New Brunswick Museum in the late ’60s and early ’70s; inclusion in regional exhibitions, including in 1976-’77, Atlantic Coast: An Illustrated Journal, at the National Gallery of Canada; works purchased by significant collections in New Brunswick and beyond, including the Canada Council Art Bank.

Still, there’s a lingering sense she didn’t get the critical attention she deserved in her life, in part, perhaps, because she was forced to play catch-up.

“She was doing all the things you needed to do,” Peter Larocque, curator of New Brunswick cultural history and art at the museum, says. “The problem was there was a whole roster of other people doing it, too, who were 25 years younger.”

Long-time friends with Saint John artists such as Miller Brittain, Jack Humphray and Ted and Rosamond Campbell, McAvity moved in artistic circles socially but didn’t paint in earnest until her mid-40s.

It was personal tragedy that prompted the return: her newly married daughter, Paddy, was killed in a car accident in the late 1950s and her husband was afflicted with serious mental illness.

“There were a number of very traumatic things in her life. Art became, in many ways, her central core, her salvation,” John McAvity says.

The painter Alexandra Flood, who grew up in Rothesay and found in McAvity an early mentor, told Lumsden she thought painting helped McAvity through this dark period,
that, “art served to dial-out the cosmos that had dealt her a pretty bad hand. It constituted her own form of a psychic break.”

While McAvity started with floral watercolours, she got a taste of the greater art world in the mid-60s, when Barry Lord, curator of the New Brunswick Museum, presented frankenthaler nolando litski, an exhibition of important American Color Field works, in 1966.

“It was the physicality of working ‘large’ on unstretched canvas that excited her and served as a sort of ‘rite of passage’ for her as a serious artist in a largely male-dominated profession,” Lumsden writes in The Colour of the Seasons catalogue.

“I think she started to think that painting is so much more than just watercolours of flowers on a modest-sized sheet,” he says.

When Lumsden joined the New Brunswick Museum as curator in 1969, he encouraged “Kay” to continue to move beyond painting “nosegays.”

“I said, ‘You want to move things around the sheet, and get some push-pull.’”

Her evolution continued in 1969 when Marjorie McIntyre, a Rothesay painter who had studied at the Art Students League in New York, encouraged McAvity to take classes at Sunbury Shores in St. Andrews. Important Canadian artists, such as Kenneth Lochhead, John Fox, Toni Onley, Ron Bloore were giving adult art workshops there.

“All of a sudden she was exposed to major non-representational painters,” Larocque says. “I think that she was searching. And I think that she found that you don’t have to be a realist, and you don’t have to be a painter of pretty flowers, that there are things that are more important and broader than that.”

It was at Sunbury Shores that McAvity met Jack Oughton, who became her partner. Together, they travelled to Europe and the Caribbean. McAvity not only had Oughton’s encouragement, but was exposed, for the first time, to different landscapes, exploring them in increasingly, colourful, abstract ways.
“I think she had a kind of natural, almost child-like kind of exposure to the beauty that she saw in nature,” Lumsden says. “She was a vulnerable person and she had all of these raw nerve endings and I think that she responded more acutely than a lot of people who might just say, ‘Well that’s a nice sunset.’”

A colorist first, her work was an aesthetic expression, an emotional response, rather than an intellectual statement.

“She has an extremely lyrical approach,” Laroque says. “Her paintings almost become like poems in terms of looking at the landscape and focusing of her attention on particular details and then reducing it to its simplicity and still being able to clearly be a landscape.”

Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal. She can be reached at wallace.kate@telegraphjournal.com