Born in 1961, I left my childhood home of Michigan to receive my B.F.A. from The Columbus College of Art and Design, then moved to Brooklyn, NY in 1983 to study at Pratt Institute earning my M.F.A. The paintings I have included on this site span my years 1995 to 2020, when I had started showing professionally in NYC. They range in scale from 12 x 12 to 60 x 60 inches, and are all created with oil paint and alkyd medium on aluminum panels.    

             "McCarty's art has an ecstatic gusto. The works are "created from layers of accumulated 'pours' of paint," she writes, which gives them an uncanny fluidity, all the more uncanny because the painterly surfaces have a haptic quality: The paintings are often "cut, scratched into, carved with sharp tools, providing paint pieces which can be applied to any of the works." Sometimes her works are beside themselves with turbulence and contradiction.Other times, her paintings perform an incandescent dance of

ravishing color".           ------ Donald Kuspit, Artforum, Oct., 2017

​

-             "Although a descendant of the elegant pouring of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis from last century, McCarty's deft compositions of ripped edges, crazed blots, sundered veils and free-range colors convey an agitation in sync with our times."            ------ R.C.Baker, Village Voice, June 22, 2017

​

            

            "The abstract paintings in this show revealed the wide range of McCarty's seeming alchemy, where colors and materials in the absence of brush strokes create an array of strange, clearly formed but unfamiliar shapes." "McCarty doesn't emote, doesn't instruct, just offers the viewer an array of unorthodox material for speculation."

                              ------ Barbara A. MacAdam, ARTnews, May 1998

​

​

I hope to reveal a play of intuition and spontaneity, preserving physical realities of formation and recording the history of their production and evolution .The meaning is in the making. Immediacy, discovery and the formation of light and color shape and create the subject and remain the subject....and in these layered acts of painting they become what they are. By honoring and coaxing both tiny movements and inviting bold gestures I feel able to capture a subtle vitality of discovery. I am more interested in "forming a form" than in describing a form. A dialogue of edges, a whisper of shape, characters with personality; a conversation between figure and ground, echoing familiar light and shadow, naturally formed events suspended in moments of evolution, not unlike our natural environment and surprising geological wonders.