Catherine McCarthy: Mother Tongue

Boston-based artist Catherine McCarthy shows new paintings dealing with man’s struggle for dominance over nature and other cultures, history and how we learn it, and the search for “home.” Her paintings bring together a diverse array of imagery and styles, taken from such sources as mid-20th century children’s textbooks, the 19th century seascape paintings of Martin Johnson Heade, Japanese wood block prints, nautical manuals, history books, and contemporary fashion magazines.

Mother tongue is one’s native language, or a language from which another language derives. In this body of work the pictorial rather than the written language takes precedence. The paintings combine imagery that is ancient and contemporary, from Eastern, Western, and Native American sources. Tight, technical sketches share space with loose, childlike drawings. Geishas travel in boats, early explorers examine the sky to understand the solar system and our place in the cosmos. Everything seems to coalesce into a search for the common ground, the original source, the universal home.