Hoodoos at Dinosaur Park 1994

It is in Jasper that McCarthy learned about the Canadian Badlands, as she relates in a 1983 interview: “[T]he Badlands! That all began when I went to a workshop in Jasper several years ago and saw photos of the Badlands. They excited me. I started making enquiries and the upshot was, we rented a van and went.” This would become important subject matter for the painter, visible in bold works like Hoodoos at Dinosaur Park.

The hoodoos in Dinosaur Provincial Park in the Canadian Badlands of Alberta are odd rock formations composed of sandstone and topped by harder material such as basalt or limestone.  They are naturally formed over millions of years through the erosion of the sandstone by wind, water, and frost. Here, McCarthy uses a group in the foreground as her focal point before leading viewers to a smaller group on the left and, ultimately, via the sediment lines, to the background. A second path from foreground to background is defined by the cap stones on the ground to the right. Although McCarthy was fond of using repeating shapes, or echoes, throughout a work, the landscape of Dinosaur Park delivered them in spades.

McCarthy was introduced to this area by Wendy Wacko, a former student at Central Technical School, whom she met by chance on a flight to Edmonton in June 1977. She invited McCarthy to visit her in Jasper to paint, and, while there, they saw photos of the Badlands. Then, in 1982, when Wacko was making the documentary Doris McCarthy: Heart of a Painter, she asked McCarthy to come to the Badlands for filming.  Initially, McCarthy wasn’t impressed by the place: “In the Alberta Badlands, the snow was gone and they were dry and desert-like, all ochres and earth colors; a strange unfamiliar landscape, full of strange forms, almost irrational, unreal. I didn’t like them very much. I was sure they had been designed by a cartoonist. But as I worked, I liked them better, for you discover some rhyme and reason to the form. I fell in love with them actually.”

McCarthy loved the challenge of painting unique landscapes, and the Badlands were like nothing she had seen before. If at first they seemed foreign to her, she warmed up to the pictorial possibilities of such a barren place in no time. They became the icebergs of her later years. She always returned to the places that tested her the most: McCarthy painted Hoodoos at Dinosaur Park on a subsequent trip to the Badlands with Wacko in the spring of 1994.