DAN McCARTHY WAS just living in a stately Victorian schoolhouse at the foot of the Catskill Mountains when he realized that a building, like a person, has multiple lives. In 2014, when he was 52 and in what he calls “the end of the second act,” the artist packed up his nearly 30-year-old apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and left a few hours north of Manhattan for a new lease of life. in a three-storey Romanesque stone structure with an impressive Dutch facade and panoramic views of the Hudson Valley. The move, while overwhelming, brought immediate relief. Ceramics had given McCarthy’s career a welcome jolt – two months before he left town, Anton Kern, his gallery owner at the time, had displayed a series of his expressive clay vessel Facepots – but sales of his crudely rendered oil paintings were not what they had been in the years Ninety; what he fantasized about most was escaping New York’s market-driven art scene.
“I wasn’t a pretty young thing anymore,” says McCarthy, now 59, on an early December afternoon as he sets down a plate of Humboldt Fog cheese in an open kitchen whose earthy warmth belies the fact that it was once a classroom. In the adjacent dining area, light streaks through translucent denim curtains, on which he has drawn grid-like patterns with bleach from a mustard dispenser, a nod to the noren he had seen in the temple in Los Angeles where his Japanese-American mother took him and his two younger sisters as children. Nearby, in an airy living room, a rock sculpture by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone and a daybed inspired by Donald Judd and crafted with marine-grade spruce plywood contribute to the meditative atmosphere of the space. “I moved to New York to be famous,” he says. “But at some point I realized that freedom would be the most important thing. … Disconnecting from the city was about disconnecting from who I was there.” (Significantly, one of the only New York memories in his home—framed strips of Andy Warhol photo booth self-portraits ripped from an auction catalog—in the basement with its two ovens.)
If McCarthy was ready for his third act when he arrived in the state, maybe the house was too. Built in 1899 as a gift to the community by Lysander Lawrence, a wealthy New Yorker who spent summers with his wife at neighboring Catskill Mountain House, the elementary school opened in 1901 and remained in operation until 1977. Shortly after McCarthy moved in took , but before he got to planting trees in the front yard, the grounds, he says, were “really accessible”; strangers showed up unannounced to request a tour, curious to see what had become of their former classrooms.
The roughly 9,200-square-foot mansion — symmetrical and stern, as if Wes Anderson had reinterpreted the Overlook Hotel — showed signs of neglect by the time jewelry designer Steven Kretchmer acquired it in the 1990s. Kretchmer replaced the arched windows and pivoting portholes, many of which had been vandalized by vandals; new red oak floors laid; and restored the chalkboards that wrap around the dining room and accentuate the second-floor living room. He also preserved the heavy wooden doors that open from those common areas into a grand entrance hall, the echoing heart of the house, with a cathedral ceiling stained dark maroon that extends to a height of 26 feet beyond the original cornice.
There, on top of a network of tables and crates, McCarthy displays what he calls his ‘greatest hits’: pots painted bright yellow, topped with ornamental birds or small anthropomorphic teacups, standing on four legs, tied with twine and pinched and wrinkled and painted and glazed and gooped. What they all have in common is an unfathomable smile, a motif McCarthy first explored as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980s when he fired, he says, “Picassoid plate pots with weird faces,” and a which he revisited when he resumed ceramics at the University of California, Davis in the summer of 2012. “I should give them a face or something,” he recalled at the time. “I tried to resist that impulse, but as soon as I did, I knew I wanted to.”
After Kretchmer’s death in a motorcycle accident in 2006, his daughter, Claudia, inherited the property and later sold it to McCarthy. He was staying with friends down the road when he saw a real estate sign in front of the schoolhouse, which he says looked “strangely foreboding and magical.” In a way, it offered the artist everything New York could no longer do: tranquility, a chance to reinvent and a surge of adventure. “In the beginning, I deliberately tried not to shower for weeks,” he says, citing Huck Finn as a source of inspiration. “I wanted to go all wild.” At one point, he invited a “spiritual person” who told him, “That man you bought the house from? He did all this for you. And now it’s your turn.’ She told me that I didn’t really own this house, that I only lived in it for a while.”
As long as he stays here, McCarthy is determined to make the place his own. While much of the building’s restoration was completed long before he moved in, his influence is nonetheless palpable in subtle personal touches: on a windowsill stands a set of rough-hewn candlesticks resembling a pair of Paleolithic chocolates made by his girlfriend, the ceramist and former art director Paula Greif; on a sawhorse-footed rubber dining table McCarthy had made out of a solid-core door, elementary wheel-thrown barrels by one of his heroes, the American potter Robert Turner. Almost everything in McCarthy’s house once belonged to someone else – or was once something completely different – and that’s the point: in all of this there’s the promise of renewal, from the ornate mosaic urn made from broken teacups by New York-based artist Joan Bankemper to the mismatched chairs he picked up from sidewalk sales and antique stores in Hudson that now around his dining table.
McCarthy paints on the ground floor. (He sleeps on the second floor, one floor up, but has a small cloister bedroom next to his studio for when he works late into the night.) In a sense, his studio serves as a memorial to his idyllic, sun-drenched first act, of which he kept the souvenirs. Stuffed fish he found online grace the space, reminding him of his teenage days on fishing boats in the late 1970s. In an east-facing room, where the morning light washes his art with a rosy glow, acrylic paintings on crescent canvases resemble psychedelic rainbows, many of them with simple phrases reminiscent of people and places from his childhood: “the Damned” (a band ), “the Starwood” (a rock venue), and “Infinity Surfboards” (a retail store). “These were the paintings I made when I first came here,” he says. “Maybe it was a way of going back to a time when I felt comfortable and safe.” Against the opposite wall are 18 of his latest paintings, which he completed over the past two years. On those canvases people dance naked, their arms outstretched in fits of ecstasy, oblivious to the rainbows streaming directly into their heads.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs leading to a whitewashed cellar, he pauses for a monumental display of radiant Facepots ranging in height from 18 to 22 inches: row after row of creations appearing alternately, and somehow all of them at the same time, dopey, surprised, angry, sarcastic, optimistic, cheerful and downright insane. They feel, he says, how we want them to feel, or maybe how we feel ourselves. “The mood differs from pot to pot,” he says over the clatter of the kettle. “They go out into the world, and they come to people in different ways. We are the ones who make them our own and fill them with meaning. After all, they are only ships.” The same, of course, applies to the rooms that surround us.