Thomas McCarthy was born in Burlington, North Carolina in 2002. He graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2024, majoring in painting. McCarthy has participated in exhibitions at the Circle Gallery in Annapolis Maryland and painted murals at the Naval Academy Primary School. He currently lives and works in Baltimore. He has a dachshund named Dolly and a cat named Steve.
I’m often alienated by the lofty ambitions of painting. It is the ultimate medium through which presidents’, kings’, saints’, and deities' images are conveyed. I’ve never been convinced. Except maybe by El Greco. I’m ashamed to admit that even paintings that extol more radical ideals that I might more readily embrace still leave me cold. No Diego Rivera mural has swayed or moved me as much as fellow leftist Alice Neel’s portraits. Perhaps her art and ideals issued both from a common deeper, less intelligible passion. I don’t know. I think she liked people and I think she liked paint. So do I.
In one of my classes, Palden Hamilton described painting as pushing around colored mud. I love that. Isn’t it really just that stupid? I’ve never been a big idea person. As I’ve moved forward in my art career, I’ve become more appreciative of modesty in art. The scale in which I work is (for the most part) modest–ten by sixteen inches–but I also have an affinity for modest, banal, even, subjects conveyed in simple, direct compositions. I like exploring the abstract essence of mundane objects and allowing these objects to remain abstract. I like how it requires layers upon layers of paint mixed in delicate balances of every pigment on my palette–balances that despite all the practice every time elude me–just to render an empty white wall. I like that the proper hue, saturation and value always eludes me. In a number of paintings, rather than fixing my mistakes I allow them to dictate the parameters within which I would complete the painting. These mistakes even occur in the drawing stage. I embrace the artifice of painting, embrace the inadequacy of my own eyes.