Pat
McCarthy

I came to painting from design, where everything is precise, exact and formatted. This work is the pushback: abstract landscapes and experimental pieces that are about how they feel, not how they look.

It started with colour, and wanting to explore it freely, without a brief. I often work from memory — my own past, and a sense of the people who came before me — and I find the making itself therapeutic, almost meditative.

Oil and encaustic pull in different directions. Oil stays changeable, and misted, transparent glazes hold something of how memory really feels: layered, uncertain, never quite fixed. Encaustic is closer to digging. I build the wax up, then cut it back to find what sits underneath an idea or a feeling.

None of the making is abstract. Encaustic means a blowtorch and molten wax, and this summer I worked through the heatwave with the flame going and the studio hotter than the day outside.

Pat McCarthy lives and works in Lewes, East Sussex. His paintings can be seen at The Studio, Oil & Dust.

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