Throughout her artistic career, McCarthy focussed on landscape. It was a “natural choice” given her love of the outdoors and the prominence of the Group of Seven during her formative years. As she herself described in the 1999 “Celebrating Life: The Art of Doris McCarthy,” “I couldn’t say at any point I turned away from my roots … I just added new dimensions to [them] from time to time.” In 1972, after retiring from forty years of teaching art at Toronto’s Central Technical School, McCarthy made her first of several trips to the eastern Arctic. She wasn’t the first southern artist to be struck by the colours and abstracted forms of Arctic ice, but she immersed herself in the natural environment and embraced it as the subject of long-time study. McCarthy stayed in Pond Inlet, on the northern tip of Baffin Island, in 1972, 1974 and 1976. She often sketched outdoors, with tubes of paint tucked into her bra to keep them soft. In “Pressure Ice – Pond Inlet,” sculptural ice at the water’s edge echoes the distant landforms. We sit with McCarthy in the snow and look across Eclipse Sound to Bylot Island, which she described in her 1991 autobiography as “like a stage set of mountains and glaciers.”