The year is 1968, and you, Frank McCarthy, artist, are painting in a cramped, airless studio in New York. You were brought up, precocious and advantaged, in Scarsdale, then educated at the prestigious Art Students League and Pratt Institute of Brooklyn. For more than 20 years, you have executed illustrations for book jackets, posters for motion pictures, and magazine covers for Collier's, Readers' Digest, and Outdoor Life. Now you can afford to paint what you please. So where do you go — upon what safe site do you relocate your snug studio?

Today Frank remembers, "I had frequently visited the West, Arizona, Sedona. And I greatly enjoyed hiking in the Red Rock County, and in one canyon in particular, which I judged to be among the most beautiful places I've ever seen."

Frank lives and paints in that canyon now, amid burly shouldered bluffs and terra-cotta terraces, snow-wrapped rims and conifer canyons, close-by ranches and neighbor Indians. Of the new surroundings, Frank comments: "We can only paint what we know intimately. When I was a kid in the East, I painted sailboats, polo ponies, and farm scenes. Yet it was in the West that I encountered the wider variety of subjects — human figures, animals, grandscale mountains, eventful streams... Now I'm at a point as a painter, I wouldn't be comfortable anywhere else."

Noted for his realistic, theatrical canvases, McCarthy is a member of the Cowboy Artists of America. He adds, "I pay no attention to New York critics. They're snobs. Look at Andy Wyeth, one of the greatest, and they panned him. If the critics talk about me, I don't read it. The only feedback I like to hear is from a customer, saying, 'I want another one, Frank.'"

In many American towns, a bank occasionally will sponsor an art show. In Sedona, Arizona, all the banks put on an art exhibit every month. McCarthy is but one of about 200 professional artists who choose to spend all or part of their working time in Sedona and the Verde Valley. They are reinforced by another couple of hundred amateurs and semiprofessionals. Max Ernst, the celebrated surrealist, painted at Sedona. Other noted Verde valley artists include Don Rodell, wildlife specialist; Charles Murphy, the game bird painter; Jeffrey Lunge, the English watercolorist; Don Bloodgood, cartoonist; Curt Walters, Grand Canyon landscapist; Del Yoakum, oil portraitist; and Paul Dyck, L. Brownell McGrew, Cynthia Bennett, Wayne Hunt, and James E. Reynolds. Some 20 galleries and other public showcases celebrate the works of painters, sculptors, and artisans of all types. Incredibly, Sedona's outpouring of sculpture supports not one, but three, foundries casting in bronze. This, in a town with a permanent population hovering around 10,000. Recently yet another art alliance was launched, the National Association of Railroad Artists, under the presidency of David Hal Morris.

Sedona's artists can be divided roughly into two groups: those who take themselves seriously, and those who don't. McCarthy is serious about it. He insists that cowboy art can be as legitimate as Renaissance art. He says, "For some artists, the reason for a picture is a historical episode involving people. I paint that. But for me, it's the painting that really counts." He talks of the endless fiddling with composition and color relationships which underlie what at casual glance might be dismissed as a mere realistic picture of a cavalry charge or Indian caravan. He works in casein and oil and expects his creations to be accepted as art. Fine art.

(This article originally appeared in "Arizona Highways", Vol. 59, No. 7, July 1983).

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)