John McCarthy is an Essex-born artist whose work blends traditional oil painting with experimental image manipulation. He studied at Central Saint Martins School of Art in London during the late 1990s, developing a meticulous approach that combines fine art skill with conceptual depth. In 1999, he was selected for the prestigious BP Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery and won the Visitor’s Choice Award, establishing him as a distinctive voice in contemporary portraiture.
McCarthy’s paintings often begin with found imagery from fashion, advertising or photography. He physically alters these source materials by creasing, folding, cropping or re-photographing them, before translating the transformed image into paint. This process distorts the original context, replacing familiar glamour with a sense of fragility, absence and ambiguity. His surfaces carry a quiet tension, inviting the viewer to question memory, perception and the fleeting nature of beauty.
Exhibiting since the early 2000s, McCarthy has held solo shows in London and participated in group exhibitions in Los Angeles and across the UK. His work has been collected privately and praised for its haunting, dream-like qualities that straddle realism and abstraction. Drawing influence from both Old Master portraiture and contemporary visual culture, McCarthy continues to explore the delicate intersection between image, identity and time.
