Exploring Jenny McCarthy's work is a step into art history. This Kerry based artist is self-taught. Her portfolio of her work explores a plethora of subjects; nudes, portraits, equestrian paintings, a series completed on the Armada, and Ventry landscapes. Her work does not hesitate to explore tenacious stylistic movements from abstraction to Cubism. Instead it provides the viewer and collector a choice of diverse styles, colours, psychologies and compositional ranges.Embracing everything which surrounds her, this only serves to highlight her strength and evolution as an artist.

Her distinction is also evident through the variety of media in which she works including oils, water colours, pastel, stained glass, pen, ink and pencil.

Initially from Limerick, McCarthy comes from a family of artists, fashion designers and goldsmiths. Jenny won the 1990 AIB Limerick - Young Artist of the Year Award (not open to professioanal artists). This was followed by the AIB Limerick Student Art Award when the prize was a day in Tony O'Malley's (RHA) studio which further inspired her contemporary abstract art.

There is a keen sense of meteorology in this collection. Her predominant medium is oils which she manipulates brilliantly, using large brush strokes to convey energy and movement. These paintings capture with insight and precision the effervescent light and the atmospheric effects of wind and rain. This landscape painter explodes the sky, making it a material part of the all over composition. The effects of the tumultuous weather in West Kerry are marvellously prominent. Paintings such as Blasket Islands from Clogher Beach, Ventry Beach, Sand Storm and Ventry Beach Storm Clouds are examples of the monochromatic weather effects around this part of the country.

Painted in dark and light tones, the drama is derived from the contrast of dark swirling masses of storm clouds which at times occupy a third of the paintings and the contrasting lucidity of the beach or water which appears in horizontal strips beneath. No figures disturb the sea or sky, and as a result there is grandeur of vision which transcends the medium, paving the way for total submersion into the painting. One feels the effects of rain on our face, the weaves of sand slithering across our feet. McCarthy's paintings are like osmosis absorbing the viewer into its realm, encapsulating our picture frame and although we view the storm from a distance, we still become part of its furore.
This was key in the work of Tony O'Malley to whom she looks for inspiration. It is as if she aims to find something beneath the external appearance of the landscape, a mode of representation which synthesises landscape and man. Different forms of Cubism have punctuated her paintings throughout the years.
Elements of George Braque find resonance in these paintings notably Ventry Beach Night Storm. In McCarthy's hand the elaborate ornamentation of Braque's Cubism is transformed into terse, simple abstraction. The best example of it is seen in Tearaght Island a monument of tectonic rigor and formal logic. Her use of colour is deeply contemplative, demanding a response from the viewer. Paired bands of colours build up in the background whilst she details a narrow delicate strip in the foreground. Her choice of colour ranges from seductively dark and portentous in the background, to fragile, and hopeful in the foreground.

Like Braque there is nothing easy about these canvases. Their delicacy is belied by the unyielding composition of the work and the emphatic mathematical attention to rhythm. Her use of straight graphite lines define the horizontal format adding to the increasing awareness of the landscape. At times the lines waver in their intensity through the eloquent use of chiaroscuro producing striking effects of illumination, yet her bold use of colour emphasises the sculptural modelling of contours and forms of the rugged landscapes.

As a colourist Jenny McCarthy renders the abstract concrete, real. Her palette is completely liberated and independent in works such as Coumenole Caves, Coumenole Rocks and Dingle Harbour. Here perceptual experience is no longer conceptualised - instead it becomes more a mental conception which is now rendered perceptible. Her brushwork is crisp, sharp, jagged like the rocks she portrays. There is an agitated element to the underlying water current reinforced through the vivid use of highly textured brushwork. These paintings are monumental and the use of blue is a feast for the eyes. These are microscopic sections, portrayed through monumental proportions. The application and textured layers of paints are metaphorically transcribed into the jagged rocks. By means of these minuscule details made large, by disassembling and reassembling these forms, McCarthy achieves a vital pictorial rhythm that embodies the thrust of these rocks as a symbol of the rugged Kerry landscape. This is poetry in paint !