Lucinda Parker McCarthy '60 - The Putney School

Cover Artist
Lucinda Parker McCarthy ’60
By Don Cuerdon
4 Putney post

Lucinda Parker McCarthy ’60,
perhaps better remembered by
classmates as “Cindy” (“My
mother’s name was Lucy, so they
called me Cindy,” says Lucinda)
has a painting career that spans 68
years, which made it that much
harder for us to choose one for the
cover of this issue. “A Glade of
Many Ages” (2011) is a 10x20-
foot mural commissioned by the
University of Oregon in Eugene
for their Ford Alumni Center. It
is a work of art as much as it is a
political statement and an experience
for the viewer. In a phone
conversation, Lucinda revealed
some of what goes into creating
such a work, and the personal
history behind it.
“A Glade of Many Ages”
has five and a half trees in
it. It’s very carefully set up
with these zig-zaggy green
shapes and then with straight
ones. One of the things about
deciding to paint trees is you
have to deal with all those
straight lines. If you’ve ever
been in the Northwest, these
trees are like any tree you’ve
seen in New England, but on
steroids. They’re huge.
As a painter, you have to
worry about how you’re
going to deal with the
fact that you have a whole
series of vertical shapes
marching across your
canvas. In this painting I
made a big effort to open it
up and to give the illusion that
you’re seeing through to a
series of maybe real horizons,
or imagined horizons, and
lines of clouds. A large part
of it is explored ahead of
time because it’s such a big
painting—10x20-foot. So I
did a beautiful raft of little
gouache paintings to study
this whole thing.
You’re standing there and
you get a physical experience
just looking at it.
It is big enough that you can
imagine walking into it. That’s
part of why I like doing big
paintings. Part of it is that they
can be seen over half a block
away. And partly because it’s
physically demanding and also
it’s physically engrossing to
look at them.
I’ve always had a love
of nature. I grew up outside
of Boston in a small town called
Wayland. At that time there
were only 7,000 people in it.
Wayland was really a rural place,
not far from Walden Pond.
I started painting when
I was two years old, but
I really got going painting
when I was at Putney.
Jerry Pfohl showed up to teach
the year I started as a student
[1957]. He just sent me out
with my paints and my boards
and I’d sit down by Garland
Pond and I’d paint whatever.
I’d paint water or trees. And
then I would come back, after
having worked hard for three
hours, and I would have
mosquitoes stuck in the
surface of the paint. Jerry
would encourage me and that’s
what it was like for three years.
I never did more painting, and
I’ve done a lot of painting.
I paint with a strong sense
of form and a strong
sense of shape and
gesture. And I’m also
very interested in straight
lines and curves—full curves,
real curves—so it’s quite
cubist in some of its ideas.
One of the interesting
political quarrels that
isn’t really obvious in
this painting, but is truly
a case in our state, is the
idea you’re supposed to
have single-age groves.
You clear-cut, then turn
around and plant little trees.
Twenty-five, 35, 45 years later
you’ve got a grove of singleage
trees—and that’s what
the industry likes. I purposely
titled this “A Glade of Many
Ages” for that reason.
You can look at commissions
in many different
ways. I’ve decided to take
time to talk to the people in
the community where the
painting is going to go, and
then do a lot of research on it
and come up with some images
that fit what I would like to
paint and the kinds of shapes
I would like to use, and at the
same time deal with where
the painting will end up.
I’m interested in early
modernism. I like Picasso.
How can you not like Picasso?
I like other lesser-known
people as well such as Lyonel
Feininger, Marsden Hartley,
and Philip Guston. I’m reading
Herman Melville’s Omoo—it’s
the second of the two books
he wrote about jumping ship
in the Pacific in the 1840s.
The first is one called Typee.
They’re wonderful. They feel
so modern.
A lot of people who do
commissions—who have
strong identities as artists—
would plunk a piece of
art down and it would be
immediately recognizable
as a Calder or as a Picasso.
It wouldn’t matter where it
was going. They would just do
it. Rather than doing that, I’ve
taken my tool kit and turned
the idea into something where
I’m looking at what I think
that community wants—or
should want.
I am a fan of acrylic on
canvas for a variety of
reasons. One is that it dries
fast and it is not necessary to
use any turpentine. I think
oil is in many ways a superior
medium, but I have spent my
whole life trying to get my
acrylics to look like oil. I use
a lot of gel to mix in with the
pigment so that the pigment
becomes more malleable and
takes longer to dry, because
acrylic dries too fast. A large
part of what makes these
paintings important in my
eyes is that I’m painting
wet into wet.
I have an inner critic that
keeps me going. You can
never do it quite well enough.
You want to do it better. And
I have some outer successes
that help with the deadlines
that keep me going—and
I’ve been doing it a long time
in a studio here in Portland,
Oregon, a long way away from
the centers of art.
Putney post 5