Doris McCarthy was an artist, teacher and writer who is best known for her ambitious depictions of the Canadian Arctic. From a young age, McCarthy developed an affinity for the landscape: her family spent the summers renting cottages on Lake Ontario or the lakes north of Toronto, and her father instilled in her a sense that nature was an essential part of her heritage. From 1926 to 1930, McCarthy studied at the Ontario College of Art under Group of Seven artists Arthur Lismer and J.E.H. MacDonald. During this period, she witnessed a wave of change sweeping through the art world, notably the rise of modernist approaches to representing the Canadian landscape. These movements were defined by exploration and experimentation, pillars that would come to define McCarthy’s own artistic journey as a landscape painter.
From 1932 to 1972, McCarthy taught art full time at Toronto’s Central Technical School. She was determined and energetic—highly involved in the Toronto arts community and committed to developing her own practice. McCarthy traveled extensively and, like her Group of Seven predecessors, sought out remote and captivating vistas. As detailed in the 1983 documentary Doris McCarthy: Heart of a Painter, she was a fierce advocate for the great Canadian tradition of painting outdoors.
In 1972, McCarthy joined an important lineage of Canadian artist-explorers and made her first trip to the Arctic. Traveling with the Federation of Ontario Naturalists for a week, she flew from Resolute Bay to Eureka, Grise Fiord and remote islands, followed by Pond Inlet. McCarthy commented, “In my first year in the Arctic, I met my very first iceberg, and I went crazy about icebergs and started doing ice form fantasies.” After this introduction, McCarthy would make many excursions to the Arctic; she took her last trip in 2004, at the age of 94. In sometimes extreme conditions, McCarthy was inventive in finding ways to accommodate her outdoor painting process. For instance, she stored tubes of paint beneath her base-layer clothing to keep the paints soft. She made small sketches, colour studies and photographs on location, providing source material for large canvas works to be completed in the studio.
As the title of this work suggests, Iceberg Fantasy #32 does not depict a specific location, but rather is a fantasized recollection of McCarthy’s experience in the Arctic. She painted approximately 60 Iceberg Fantasy works, a comprehensive meditation on the otherworldly qualities of the arctic landscape. Early works in this series recalled the simplified style of hard-edge abstraction she had experimented with in the 1960s, featuring two-dimensional planes and minimal contrasting palettes.
Iceberg Fantasy #32, completed in 1985, is a masterful and confident painting that represents the artist’s mature understanding of her subject. These bergs have evolved into three dimensions, their textured surfaces and sharp edges highlighted by twilight’s glow. McCarthy employs a bold palette, midnight blue and turquoise melding with warm golden white. Defying rationality, the three massive ice structures are translucent, revealing an interplay of layering as they drift among each other. There is a stark contrast between the solid opacity of the near, icy shoreline and the untouchable, shadowy bergs. The huge forms are unmatched in scale—weighty and towering impossibly towards the clouds—yet their translucence highlights an essentially ephemeral nature.
Iceberg Fantasy #32 is a striking accomplishment—a vivid rendering that underscores the epic majesty of the bergs. While historic arctic images relied on idealization and distant views, McCarthy brings us into intimate proximity with her own personal experience of the Arctic. She pushes the boundaries of landscape painting, presenting the North not only as a place but also as an experiential fantasy of remoteness and wonder.