Catharine Amelia MacNeill McAvity

Published on Apr 20, 1999
The Globe and Mail
John G. McAvity

Born in Belleville, Ont., on July 30, 1915; died in Saint John NB of heart failure on January 13, 1999, aged 83. Jack Weldon Humphrey (1901-­1967) Since my mother’s death, two things have struck me about an artist’s life. Artists leave a lasting legacy for those who cherish life and beauty. And just how important passion is for life! Belleville was never home to this proud Maritimer. She simply entered the world where her young parents were briefly stationed on an assignment for the railway. She was born into the old Prince Edward Island clan of MacNeills from Stanley Bridge, the family that adopted a young Lucy Maud Montgomery. She married into the old New Brunswick business clan, the McAvitys of Saint John or, rather more importantly, Rothesay. Like so many, she rarely travelled or knew the world outside of the Maritimes until later in her life.

It was a few words of encouragement from her high school teacher in Moncton, Miss McLeod, that led her to pursue art despite the prevailing view that it was not a career, but a lady’s hobby, and certainly not what one needed in the Depression. She was sent to Mount Allison University for more employable skills, but quietly studied art on the side without her parents’ knowledge. She married a handsome young rogue, Pat McAvity, raised two children, and did all the things a young woman of society was expected to do in Rothesay and forgot her love of painting. But life’s tragic moments altered her life. The sudden death of her daughter, Paddy, in 1957 in a car accident and the subsequent collapse of Pat’s mental health, including attempts at suicide, was very dark years. Eventually she and Pat separated. Fortunately, she saved herself by going back to those words of encouragement from Miss McLeod. She found escape from a world of worry and pain in a new world of colour and passion. She threw herself into painting, studied with Jack Humphrey, Ted and Rosamond Campbell and other New Brunswick artists. 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.

In 1971, while attending Sunbury Shores Arts and Nature Centre in St. Andrews, NB she fell in love with its director, Dr. Jack Oughton. The influence of his background in the natural sciences and photography lifted her work to a more imaginary and impressionistic level, still grounded in nature and colour. He introduced her to travel, including long sojourns on remote Caribbean islands and in Antibes in the south of France, and her work became more poetic and bold as a result.

It was a new life for her, in a bright, colourful world of imagination, often not understood by her old friends. She and Jack bonded with other artists. She exhibited with them, they traded works, and held lively parties and discussions in their home in Rothesay, a part of Canada where teh arts were not well appreciated. Jack built her a studio, named Red Cloud, in the old garage at the back of their home where she spent hours immersed in watercolours, surrounded by wild flowers from their garden and walls crowded with her paintings.

In 1990, she mysteriously gave up painting, just as quickly as she had re-discovered it 30 years earlier. Immediately, her health deteriorated although she never lost her love of art. Her external passion was replaced by the internalized insecurity of a waning life.

Even in her last years, she would beam with joy and life whenever anyone stopped by to see her paintings. Despite new pains from arthritis and old worries which returned, she would be transported into the world she had left and could instantly recount stories of any one of her more than 1,00 paintings. She had lost her passion for life, but not for art.

Her legacy lives in many museums and private collections and in the recently dedicated Catharine McAvity Room at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. John G. McAvity John G. McAvity is the executive director of the Canadian Museums Association in Ottawa and her son.