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“I have always painted what was inside me, and that has made my work extremely personal, maybe even difficult for other people to understand.”

– Catharine McAvity

“A playful surrealist, McAvity dots her landscapes with trees and hills that float in front of the horizon…and her skylines are dreamy and filled with bold, sometimes lurid colours.”

– R. M. Vaughan, 
Telegraph Journal and arts critic for The Globe and Mail

“I recognized the power of her mastery of form and colour in those paintings, and encouraged her to take it farther….The main thing was that I took her development as an artist seriously, because I could see and told her that she really was an artist.”

– Barry J. Lord, museum consultant, former editor ArtsCanada 
and former curator of art at the NB Museum.

“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.”

– Ian G. Lumsden,
curator of The Colour of the Seasons

“She found escape from a world of worry and pain in a new world of colour and passion…..She made it her work to capture beauty in watercolours, not unhappiness. As she looked into the countryside around her, she could not believe the beauty that trees, flowers and landscapes could possess."

– John G. McAvity, son.

“In painting I transform an image, usually of nature, abstracting the form or changing the colour.”

– Catharine McAvity