Catherine McWilliams: Selected Work 1961 - 2021

Instead of painting … the bombings and
destruction, she painted people who in general
took no active part in it. She did a series of
paintings of the children she taught and the
women she met. Most of that work was bought
by the women of the area. 10
McWilliams’ more personal work documents her
home life and marriage to Joseph, a union of two
artists based on reciprocity and understanding. As
she describes it ‘we both agreed that we would go
into teaching somehow or other and would make
our lives as painters’. 11 McWilliams was committed
to family life and art. She and Joseph met the
influential German performance artist Joseph Beuys
when he visited Belfast at the height of the Troubles
in 1974. Three years later, the young family joined a
group of artists from Belfast who Beuys invited to
Documenta 6, the international arts exhibition in
Kassel, Germany. 12 The couple were also involved in
exhibiting and selling art through the Cavehill Gallery
which they established in 1986 in their home in North
Belfast. Initially exhibiting their own art in the two
large front rooms, they soon expanded to include the
work of friends and other local artists. The gallery
lasted 16 years and became a focus for artists and
art enthusiasts in the area. 13 McWilliams’ children
remember that making art was simply part of family
life; even on holiday both parents would spend time
drawing and painting. Inevitably, they also became
her models and Boy with Pigeon’s (1982) is a portrait
of the artist’s son, the painter Simon McWilliams.
Boy with Pigeons 1982
Mixed media on paper
36 × 40 cm
All these aspects of life - teaching, motherhood
and marriage - are folded into McWilliams’ visual
language.
In particular, the artist elevates the everyday
intimacies of her long relationship across domestic
scenes which are reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard’s
late interiors. Where Bonnard painted his wife
Marthe in the bath, McWilliams draws and paints
Joseph in the shower. There are similarities in
the formal devices of both artists. Bonnard and
McWilliams frame the figure within the confines
of the bath or shower. There is a familiarity with
a particular body, reviewed in the act of washing.
The flesh tones in both artists’ work are reimagined
through memory and painterly touch. In McWilliams’
case, she uses vivid pinks and oranges to suggest
the heat of skin warmed by water. Both artists
are interested in capturing a partner lost to her/
his own private thoughts, locating the meditative
moment within a habitual act. This similarity to
Bonnard may be seen again in Breakfast Table
(1987) where Joseph’s figure is mostly hidden in
the kitchen clutter and potted plants. These works
are instinctive for McWilliams but are nonetheless
progressive for picturing her husband in the role of
muse within the domestic interior.
McWilliams depiction of the male nude was both
unusual in Irish art and controversial in the context
of the social and religious conservatism of Northern
Ireland. In an unpublished text written in 1983, the
art historian Eileen Black discussed how McWilliams’
life drawings and male nudes became the subject
of controversy when exhibited at the Royal Ulster
Academy and in an exhibition at the Peacock Gallery,
Craigavon
The drawings received praise from local art
critics but attracted … abuse from other
sources, who took predictable offence at
Catherine’s unfettered approach to male
nudity (while, of course, not raising too many
objections to the nude women she portrayed).
In fact, a second showing at Craigavon in 1983
… found Catherine being accused of producing
‘pornographic graffiti’. 14 Pornography is, in this
instance, very much in the eye of the beholder.
For Catherine McWilliams, the human form has
been, simply, her chief source of inspiration
for many years. 15
Studio Interior (1991) may be read as another
landmark composition in Irish painting. McWilliams
was asked to make work for a maternity hospital
in Dublin on the theme of giving birth. She decided
to document the birth of a painting, recasting
the art historical model of the virile, promethean
artist as a mother. The image has all the energy and
physicality of painting as an embodied experience.
She describes the work as ‘expressing something
about the need (to paint); I wanted it to be gestural
and painterly’. 16 The figure in the composition seems
to twist and dissolve into the brush strokes. Again,
the colour yellow foregrounds this positive energy,
the desire to inhabit the painter’s body and to make
painterly painting, where the ‘sense of the artist’s
touch … allows for a deep connection, painter to
painter.’ 17 This work is typical of a particularly
haptic quality to McWilliams’ compositions. It is
a tactile practice, where viscous paint holds the
gesture of the brush and heavy impasto work often
pushes the surface towards three dimensionality.
McWilliams’ dual relationships with the medium of
paint and the city of Belfast are co-dependent. Her
imagination is captured by local streets and urban
life. Even when her compositions deal with the
surrounding landscape – Cavehill, Black Mountain
and Divis – the artist’s viewpoint will frequently
pull in nearby housing estates, Lenadoon and
Ardoyne. McWilliams’ landscapes may be read in
opposition to twentieth century Irish painting used
to promote a nascent cultural identity. At the start
of that century, Northern Irish artists Paul Henry
and Charles Lamb journeyed into the rural west of
Ireland to depict an idealised ‘cottage landscape…
romanticised and emptied of critical contents such
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