Born in New York City on March 30, 1924, I moved to Scarsdale, New York, in 1929, where I attended grammar and high school. The progressive education offered at the grammar school allowed me to develop my talent in painting. In the third grade, I had literally drawn my class into a corner of the room. My pictures had started as drawings on paper, but soon the challenge of the large floor area took over and dinosaur drawings spread out farther and farther into the classroom, forcing the teacher and fellow pupils to move more and more towards the corner of the room.

The encouragement of my high school teachers and my parents led me to go to the Art Students League in New York City to study during the summers. At the age of fourteen, I was studying under George Bridgeman, a dynamic and renowned anatomy teacher who had written several books on the subject. Later, I studied under Reginald Marsh, a very well-known and still highly prized painter of the Depression Era. The next step after high school was an illustration course at Pratt Institute of Brooklyn. During all this time there was no deviation from my goal to become a good artist, one who could express and satisfy his own visual desires and find a subject matter and medium of painting that would best fulfill this need.

Working as an apprentice in a large studio in New York City was a start. I mounted and delivered photographs and drawings and, after a period, was elevated to doing mechanicals — laying out type and photos, pasting them down in a prescribed position on the page from which they were reproduced. But my interest soon lagged at this job and only after a staff artist resigned and I was catapulted into the position of artist did I begin to find the satisfaction I was looking for. During this period, a matter of a few years, a lasting friendship was started with a fellow artist, Charlie Dorsa. Indeed, it was Charlie who in 1969 was instrumental in placing my work in a prominent New York gallery.

In 1948, leaving my salaried job, I began as a freelance artist working on movie posters and hundreds of small jobs. Within a year, a friend and I took an extended trip around the country. We covered a good portion of the Western states and western Canada — fourteen thousands miles of scenery that was overwhelming! I sketched and took photographs of what I saw, the mountains, streams, lakes, and deserts. Shortly after this trip, I married Mary Fahrendorf, a girl I had been dating since I was fifteen. Mary and I have two children, Jean and Kevin. With the added responsabilities, I worked furiously. After a period of doing illustrations for the American Weekly, a syndicated magazine section for newspapers, I started doing paperback covers, and over the years I have painted hundreds and worked for all the leading paperback publishers. These led to illustrations for magazines such as Colliers, American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Argosy, True, Outdoor Life, Reader's Digest, and others. My recognition in this filed of illustration led to commissions to do advertising paintings for all the major movie companies and innumerable advertising paintings for many of the large corporations. Some of the aforementioned paintings received awards in the National Twenty-four Sheet Poster Competition and also for paperback covers from the Illustrators' Club's Annual shows.

I had for many years wanted to paint for galleries, but it wasn't until 1969 when, during a a walk on the beach at our annual picnic to celebrate our son's birthday, Charlie Dorsa made up my mind for me. "Do a couple and try it," he said. I did two paintings which were placed in a New York gallery through Charlie, and they sold immediately. From then on, more and more time was devoted to painting, until two years later I was doing no commercial work.

Some Western artists document, some do scenery, animals, and portraits of Indians. I paint to achieve visual impact — trying to redesign, if you will, the beautu and character of God's creation in the West: the mountains, streams, lakes, deserts, and most of all, the rock. I put into this setting the characters that roamed it: mountain men, free traders, cavalry, cowboys, and Indians as well as the vehicules that crossed it such as the wagon trains and the stagecoaches. My paintings are based on truth and their settings in reality, but the events are not specific. I guess the illustrator in me likes to leave the story to the beholder and never end a situation in a painting, always leaving another hill to climb and stream to cross.

I start with abstract pencil drawings — scribbles, my children used to called them — which are searching for new patterns of light and shade, etched with action ultimately to appear in each painting. Despite the planning and sketches, in some cases several very different paintings are underneath the final one. As the painting progresses, the story develops, and additions or deletions are made in the constant search for beauty and form. To me, beauty is the eroded, sometimes jagged, coarse rock, gnarled bleached-out logs and stumps, the dirt and the sage, as well as the play of light on muscles levering a carbine or wielding a war club, or a horse galloping full tilt. All this in its infinite variations of patterns of light, shade and color, are beauty to me.

Most of my paintings are casein underpainting with glazes or overpainting or both in oil on a gesso-covered masonite panel. Casein is a permanent water-based paint derived from dairy products. Leonardo da Vinci used a version of casein, as did many of the old masters.

The paintings in this book I hope will bring you pleasure. The good Lord willing, this will be only the beginning.

FRANK C. McCARTHY
Connecticut, 1973

(This text originally appeared in "The Western Paintings of Frank C. McCarthy", Ballantine Books, 1974).

More articles:

August 1950 - "Introducing A New Junior Literary Guild Artist"
May 27, 1955 - "Collier's Credits" (by Jerome Beatty, Jr.)
circa 1972 - "With A Paint Brush Instead Of A Gun"
1974 - "Frank C. McCarthy" (by Frank C. McCarthy)
October 1976 - "Frank C. McCarthy" (by James K. Howard)
May 1981 - "A Visit With Frank McCarthy" (by Kay Mayer)
July 1981 - "Frank C. McCarthy" (by Piet Schreuders)
June 10, 1982 - "Cowboy Art" (by Stewart McBride)
July 1983 - "The Verde Valley - A Personal Profile" (by Frank Brothers)
July 1989 - "The 007' Files: Selling Bond" (by Stephen Rebello)
November 1989 - "Illustrators - Part 1: Movie Posters" (by Franz L. Brown)
October 17, 1990 - "McCarthy Paints For Visual Impact" (by Gail Arnold)
2001 - "The Illustrator in America, 1860-2000" (by Walt Reed)