William McCarthy Paintings

William McCarthy is an American artist born in 1951. In every one of McCarthy's works, we can find these luminous and mysterious images of trees against a sky, field or river, which evoke a subtle variation of light and atmosphere. For McCarthy, the arrangement of the trees, whether standing in solitude or pairs or large groupings seem at once surprising, or accidental. Yet all of his paintings are composed from memory, imagination and thumbnail sketches from his basement studio in his home in Connecticut. He works on wood board, paper and canvas using several layers of gesso before priming the surface with cadmium red base. Then a quick sketch using charcoal is used to lay out the design then the oil paint is applied. He works in layers using thinned down oil paint, building the layers with glazing techniques. Upon completion, a final coat of varnish is applied. For McCarthy, light has come to play an important role, and as he describes when he looks back to his body of work, "I feel it speaks about spiritual places, places that contain a quiet inner light, radiating an ethereal whisper, the places we see everyday."