Light, Movement, and the Language of Abstraction
Color surges, gestures sweep, and space seems to breathe within the expansive abstractions of Kathleen McCarty. Her paintings are not quiet meditations but vibrant environments that pulse with energy and invitation. Rooted in the traditions of post painterly abstraction and Color Field painting, her work carries forward a lineage of luminous surfaces and immersive scale while asserting a distinctly personal sensibility. Rather than pursuing strict formalism, she emphasizes sensation and uplift, seeking moments when hue, motion, and spatial presence converge into something unexpected. Each canvas becomes an arena for discovery, shaped less by rigid planning than by responsiveness and intuition. Viewers encounter fields of radiant color that seem to expand beyond their edges, creating a visual experience that feels both atmospheric and embodied. In this interplay between structure and spontaneity, McCarty positions abstraction as a living, breathing force capable of stirring emotion and awakening perception.
Her artistic formation began in Wisconsin and was shaped significantly by her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. A formative year in Florence, Italy, deepened her sensitivity to light, composition, and the expressive potential of surface. Exposure to European art history and architectural space broadened her understanding of how color can define atmosphere and guide movement across a plane. These academic experiences provided a strong technical and conceptual foundation, yet her mature voice emerged through experimentation and risk. The discipline of drawing, painting, and art historical study instilled confidence, but intuition gradually became her primary compass. Over time, she cultivated a practice centered on presence and openness, allowing each painting to evolve through layered decisions rather than predetermined outcomes. This balance between education and instinct continues to inform the assured yet exploratory character of her abstract language.
A pivotal relocation to Northwest Washington marked another significant chapter in her development. The Skagit Valley, with its luminous coastal light and shifting weather patterns, exerts a quiet but persistent influence on her visual vocabulary. Water, cliffs, forest, and sky exist in constant conversation there, and that dynamic exchange finds resonance in her compositions. Instead of depicting landscape directly, she translates its sensations into movement and chromatic intensity. Marine blues, verdant greens, acidic yellows, and saturated pinks interact in ways that echo tidal motion and atmospheric change. Daily exposure to the valley’s evolving light conditions sharpened her sensitivity to transparency and radiance. The environment does not serve as a backdrop but as an active catalyst, shaping both the emotional tone and the structural rhythms of her canvases. Through abstraction, she captures the feeling of immersion within a landscape defined by flux and brilliance.
Kathleen McCarty: From Wall to Floor, A Transformative Shift
A decisive transformation in McCarty’s practice occurred when she moved away from gessoed canvases mounted vertically and began working on raw canvas placed directly on the floor. This change reoriented her entire relationship to the painting surface. Gravity, movement, and bodily engagement assumed greater prominence, allowing her to approach each composition with heightened physical involvement. Pouring and staining acrylic paint onto unprimed fabric enabled color to seep into the fibers, creating luminous fields that feel embedded rather than applied. The surface absorbs pigment unevenly, producing subtle variations in saturation and tone that contribute to depth. Without the barrier of gesso, the canvas becomes porous and responsive, capturing each gesture as an imprint of motion. This approach fosters a sense of immediacy and risk, since once color penetrates the raw material, it cannot be fully retrieved. The resulting works carry traces of both control and surrender.
Layering plays a crucial role in the complexity of these compositions. After establishing translucent stains, McCarty introduces semi opaque ribbons, arcs, and sweeping gestures that traverse the surface with confident velocity. Transparency and opacity engage in a visual dialogue, creating a rhythmic interplay between foreground and background. Forms overlap and intersect, sometimes hovering lightly and at other times asserting bold presence. The oscillation between depth and flatness generates tension that energizes the entire painting. Although her process is intuitive, it is far from arbitrary. Years of experience inform her sensitivity to balance, proportion, and directional flow. Diagonals counteract vertical movements, saturated passages are tempered by open areas of canvas, and dense activity is offset by breathing space. The physicality of pouring, staining, and gesturing is always visible, preserving the spontaneity of the act while sustaining a carefully calibrated structural coherence.
This immersive method aligns her with the legacy of stain painters, yet her work distinguishes itself through its emphasis on structural tension and chromatic vitality. Where some approaches favor diffusion and softness, McCarty’s compositions frequently introduce assertive gestures that cut across veils of color like currents of wind or shifting tides. The floor based process grants her the freedom to move around the canvas, responding to emerging forms from multiple vantage points. The painting evolves as a field of relationships rather than a fixed image conceived in advance. Through this bodily engagement, she cultivates a heightened awareness of scale and spatial impact. Large expanses of color are not simply decorative; they establish environments that envelop the viewer. The transformation from wall to floor therefore represents more than a technical adjustment. It signals a philosophical shift toward openness, immersion, and trust in the unfolding process.
Chromatic Uplift and Environmental Resonance
McCarty frequently describes her work as an exploration of upliftment, and this intention is most evident in her bold and buoyant palette. Acidic yellows flare against marine blues, verdant greens mingle with saturated magentas, and unexpected chromatic encounters spark visual electricity. These colors do not function as isolated accents but as active forces that shape the emotional climate of each canvas. Through layering and staining, hues appear to glow from within, producing a sense of radiance that recalls the luminous atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest coastline. Transparency allows underlying tones to shimmer through upper layers, enriching the overall depth. Rather than settling into harmony too quickly, colors collide, dissolve, and reemerge, sustaining a dynamic tension that keeps the eye in motion. This vibrant chromatic interplay embodies her commitment to creating spaces that elevate perception and invite viewers into a heightened sensory experience.
The coastal surroundings of the Skagit Valley continue to inform both the movement and mood of her abstractions. Daily walks through terrain shaped by water, cliffs, and forest provide a steady source of visual and emotional stimulus. Shifting weather patterns alter light and shadow throughout the day, offering constant reminders of impermanence and transformation. McCarty translates these observations into gestural arcs that suggest tidal crossings, atmospheric shifts, or botanical rhythms without resolving into literal representation. The paintings feel alive with motion, as if currents pass beneath their surfaces. Open passages of raw canvas evoke moments of pause or breath, echoing the expansive horizons of the landscape. By internalizing these environmental experiences rather than depicting them directly, she creates works that resonate with place while maintaining the autonomy of abstraction. The result is a body of work that feels grounded in lived experience yet expansive in its interpretive possibilities.
Immersion becomes especially powerful in her large scale paintings, where the viewer’s body enters into direct dialogue with the field of color. Scale amplifies gesture and intensifies the sensation of spatial depth. Standing before one of these canvases, the eye travels along sweeping forms and sinks into translucent passages, experiencing color as atmosphere rather than surface decoration. The absence of rigid boundaries within the composition encourages prolonged engagement, as relationships between shapes continue to reveal themselves over time. This sense of unfolding discovery mirrors her own process in the studio, where each decision emerges in response to what has already occurred. By maintaining openness throughout the act of creation, she preserves a quality of freshness in the final work. The paintings become environments that hold both the memory of their making and the promise of ongoing interpretation.
Kathleen McCarty: Expanding the Intuitive Horizon
Among her significant works, Collide stands as a vivid example of her approach to scale, tension, and chromatic force. Measuring five by four feet and executed in acrylic on raw canvas, the painting encapsulates her fascination with balancing transparency and bold gesture. Veils of stained color establish a luminous ground, while sweeping arcs and assertive strokes traverse the surface with palpable energy. The interaction between these elements creates dynamic visual tension, as if forces are converging and dispersing simultaneously. Depth emerges through overlapping forms, yet the raw canvas remains an active participant, visible in areas where pigment thins or recedes. Collide invites viewers to step into its chromatic environment, experiencing the push and pull of movement across its expansive field. The work exemplifies her ability to transform intuitive decisions into compositions that feel both spontaneous and structurally resolved.
Now working full time in her studio, McCarty is developing a new body of large scale paintings that synthesize earlier explorations into an even more expansive visual language. This current phase reflects a deepened trust in intuition combined with the technical confidence gained through years of experimentation. Elements from her previous methods, including staining, layering, and gestural intervention, are integrated with greater fluidity and assurance. The emphasis on upliftment remains central, yet the compositions continue to evolve in complexity and ambition. By embracing openness and responsiveness, she sustains a practice defined by growth rather than repetition. Each canvas becomes an opportunity to test new relationships between color, space, and movement. Through this ongoing commitment to exploration, Kathleen McCarty affirms abstraction as a living process, one capable of transforming raw material and lived experience into radiant, immersive encounters.
