The good wine: An artist comes of age

Doris McCarthy, whose extraordinary career embraces more than half a century of Canadian art history, won glowing reviews for the first installment of her warm and intimate autobiography, A Fool in Paradise, the book that recounted her growth as a woman and artist. It marked a new departure for women’s autobiography: Elspeth Cameron, writing in Saturday Night magazine called it “a book so direct and simple it seems almost to invent its form.” The Toronto Star declared it a work of “great fascination, deserving a permanent place on the shelf of Canadian artists memoirs.” Books in Canada echoed countless others: “it makes one yearn for more.”The Good Wine describes her life from 1950 to 1991. At age forty, she broke free of her teaching responsibilities to take a year’s sabbatical in Europe as a full-time painter. It was the first of many adventures in the wider world that included a solitary round-the- world odyssey from Japan to Australia, India to the Middle East. She discovered the Arctic and in 1991, Antarctica, drawing inspiration for her art and her life in the far-flung corners she visited and in the beloved landscape of her own country.Encounters with Dorothy Sayers and Arnold Toynbee, friendships with Bora Laskin and Boyd Neel, politics and controversies within the fledgling Canadian art community, the painful losses and unexpected victories of later life — all colour this account of four decades that saw her recognized as one of Canada’s foremost landscape painters. Doris McCarthy’s vibrant, creative energy, her intense and hard-won independence, the great strength she found in love and friendships make this second volume of her memoirs as enchanting as the first.