CATHERINE McCARTHY
That tiny ember of rage flared bright
and on dry regrets caught hold

In the past 5 years, Boston-based painter Catherine McCarthy’s life-long
fascination with Japanese woodblock prints has emerged as the primary
influence on her paintings of layered and appropriated imagery of self-
discovery.

This series of paintings follows the journey of the artist's alter ego, the
geisha Nagasaki Moon. Enfolded in multi-layered kimonos, the color and
pattern of each signifying season and status and obscuring what lies
beneath, Nagasaki Moon makes her modest journey through the psychic
geography of her quest. Traveling stoically through winter landscapes
and across stormy seas, Nagasaki Moon’s trials come by water, the age-
old signifier of purification.

In several paintings, the tsunami batters her with cultural expectations
or the monsoon purges her of the clutter of the world. In another,
Nagasaki Moon opens her lips in speech and is surprised by an outpour-
ing of storm-tossed surf. The ocean upon which she has cast her fate
was within her all along.

Stylistically, the paintings are a melding of traditional Japanese prints,
the late nineteenth century paintings of Whistler and Manet, and the
gestural brushwork of the mid-twentieth century artists Franz Kline and
Robert Motherwell (who were themselves looking to the art of calli-
graphy). As a group, they form an open-ended psychological narrative
as complex, sensual and rich with nuanced meaning as the layers of
Nagasaki Moon’s garments.