Sold for: $85,250

PROVENANCE
Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Alberta

Doris McCarthy was an ambitious adventurer who documented landscapes on several continents. When McCarthy retired from teaching in 1972, she began making annual trips to the Canadian Arctic. The conditions were extreme, but McCarthy remained fiercely committed to her craft. She employed inventive accommodations for sketching in the harsh climate: she stored tubes of paint beneath her base-layer clothing to keep the paint soft, and she added glycerine to her watercolours to prevent them from freezing.

Bylot Island Glacier with Berg was painted two decades after McCarthy first visited the Arctic, following one of her only true winter excursions. Daylight was absent from Pond Inlet in January, and the spring thaw was months away. The icy scene is without human references, relying instead on McCarthy’s composition and sculpted forms to convey the awe-inducing scale. Imposing mountains, like Lawren Harris’s iconic Bylot Island renderings, speak of inaccessible remoteness—incomprehensible vastness—and a meandering glacier, likely Kaparoqtalik Glacier, emerges to meet the glass-like sea. Seemingly within reach, illuminated by subtle winter twilight, icebergs are rendered with crisp clarity. The poetic duality of mountains and sea is a poignant expression of McCarthy’s intimate yet inspired experience of the Far North.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars