Sold for: $181,250

PROVENANCE
Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto
An Important Corporate Collection, Canada

LITERATURE
Doris McCarthy, Celebrating Life: The Art of Doris McCarthy, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1999, page 219

Doris McCarthy’s work was influenced by Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris’s simplification of form, and her father, George McCarthy, an early conservationist, instilled in her a love of nature. McCarthy’s first visit to the Arctic was in 1972, and it was the start of annual trips to the North. After her initial encounter with icebergs, she described “the brilliant turquoise and incredible green of the deep crevasses of glacial ice, the result of the enormous pressure of the weight of that great depth of ice, fifteen metres of it visible, and more than ten times that depth below the surface.” Aurora and the Bergs is a stunning depiction of icebergs, their brilliant white tips emerging from a transparent ocean that reveals their sculptural forms below, in darkening tones of mauve, green and teal. McCarthy has captured an exceptional atmosphere in the stillness of night illuminated by the arc of the northern lights. Globe and Mail art critic John Bentley Mays wrote that paintings like this were a document of “McCarthy’s inward apprehension of what it is to stand on the very edge of the world.”

All prices are in Canadian Dollars