John McCarthy

“How John is missed!

This is a man who wore many hats in the course of his lifetime and played many roles for his family and friends. He had a public life, a working life, to be sure. He retired from the full-time practice of law in 1996. But by the time I met John McCarthy—it was at an art opening for a solo show in Charlottesville—he was in a later phase, that of being an exceptionally interesting and interested artist.

He became for me a reliable friend and a letter-writer and a source of information, insight and inspiration for years running. And I am not done with him yet.

This fellow walked a tightrope, tipping forward in the course of a single conversation with opinionated, strongly voiced hilarious observations, then tipping back with self-effacing, self-deprecating remarks. And he sure could paint.

He also read art voraciously – history, biography, criticism. He had an appetite for the new. He would try on new styles, new techniques, new media. He was not, as many are, too old to learn. He took courses in what he hadn’t yet tried, happy to be a beginner all over again.

He took on printmaking, after painting, and then back to painting, now with fresh ideas. He tried small canvases and then big and then small. He learned palette knives after brushes, and then brushes again. He made wonderful photographs. But he was first and last a colorist and knew it and said so.

And we still have John McCarthy in his art and his skill is still so fresh. It gives us the pleasure that was in the eyes of the artist seeing something and then making something, and which now our eyes would delight in and wish to see again and then yet again. Which artist would not want that said of him? And yet it can be said of John, in spades.

He was ravenous to look at art and would travel to do so. Between one letter and the next, from 2000 to 2008, John together with his wife Judy would have seen another show and another, and he could write about it so well that you took in its essence. He kept up a steady diet of books, journals and exhibits and always had a new interest and a new plan.

He sampled many tastes—Bonnard, Diebenkorn, Turner, Morisot, Auerbach, de Kooning, Avery, Monet, Warhol—but he had his favorites, those he would come back to again and again and claim in his own work: Matisse, Rothko, and especially Wolf Kahn.

He was a student of Kahn both artistically and actually; taking a workshop and getting the artist’s personal advice. He read every interview and comment and even bought Kahn’s work, several times. He was “enchanted” by Kahn’s strategy: “Come slowly and grudgingly to something which resembles nature.”

I have a sharp memory of John describing an entire day spent at a canvas carefully studying and then improvising from a tiny corner portion of a Matisse print, a small swatch of color juxtapositions which had intrigued him; exploring, experimenting with exactly how just a few colors had coalesced with such felicity and advantage.

From Rothko he gleaned an entire visual format: the colors above and the colors below a line which, however abstract in presentation, must be read as a horizon—that is to say, a landscape, saying, “My work continues to be these straight shots of landscape that…owe a lot to Rothko. Every time I start to work on a different motif I realize…it’s not what I want to do and head back to a basically horizontal motif.”

John unabashedly appropriated ideas and techniques from other artists, mindful of Picasso’s remark about “stealing from the best”—but John only borrowed from artists who loved paint, not just painting but paint itself, how it moved on the surface.

Several days ago I painted over an old canvas with oil primer and after that dried I applied a mixture of ultrmarine blue, manganese blue and a generous helping of titanium and zinc white. It made the loveliest blue I’ve yet been able to make. I wiped off portions of it… and the canvas looks like disturbed water in a swimming pool.

He retrieved and sent me a quote which quite delighted him from the artist Sean Scully:
“I use oil paint because it has a disobedient and mysterious nature…It engages issues of alchemy and mystery that resist the deadening ambition of the modern world to control everything absolutely.”

John’s feelings were strong and his reactions unmuddled and a great pleasure to hear. About Cy Twombly he wrote: “His purely graffiti works leave me cold. His more lush paintings are irresistible!”

And about another artist: “The richness of…colors and sumptuousness of…surfaces (is the) painterly equivalent of ‘slow food’ (in that they appear) unhurried and devoid of undue angst.”

His analysis of others’ work was lucid and plain spoken: “I don’t think I’m better than the artist just because I criticize her color. She obviously emphasizes design while I’m for color all the way.”

And about another: “Klee said he was willing to sacrifice monumentality for the sake of intensity. Me too.”

With John it was always the new. He painted fearlessly. He conveyed boldness and energy. In one letter he said, “I’m painting up a storm!”

And in another: “The process of painting consists largely of screwing up and then rescuing the painting from disaster.”

And in yet another, “Occasionally something happens when one has the ‘impudence’ of faith to believe it could happen.”

Yet humility attended all his experiments and he could take criticism. About a large canvas, which we discussed extensively, he said, “I don’t think it’s a great work or even a good one, just had to get that Pollock thing out of my system.”

Also: “I…have started off in a new direction here at home and, guess what?, my wife likes my old work better!”And, “It’s frustrating to me but I think part of my frustration comes from a thought in the back of my mind that she’s right.”

And last here, but first in my memories, is John McCarthy’s sense of humor. He took art, but not himself, so seriously. He once responded, when someone recommended to him that the artist Morandi serve as his model, “Trouble is, Morandi had such integrity and his work is so austere that it simply doesn’t fit my suave and flamboyant personality.”

And, “Lately, I’ve been in that essential learning phase that…no one pays us for!”

John was good-humored in the face of disappointment. In one letter he noted dryly,
“The works that I sent to New York have now been returned to me as ‘too bright’. After getting them back, I looked at them and decided that, indeed they were too bright!”

After a less than robust opening night for a show, he wrote that “Weather.com predicted 2 inches of rain that night and I think that depressed turnout*
*not a drop fell.”

I have wanted to say the right things about John McCarthy, with his fine mind and marvelous hand. I have failed to even touch on another face of the man shown to me—his generosity. I bought some paintings and he gave me others. He shared his time and himself and the pleasure, which that memory gives is strong. So too the pleasure of remembering a scene of happy domesticity: the landscape and home and wife (and Buddy the dog!) and an artist at the quotidian task of making great art, one conversation at a time.”

—James Brewer
January 2011