Harry McVay (born 1947) American, Landscape Watercolor on Paper. Depicts lily pads on a vast watery expanse with a treeline in the distance, full of luminous color and depth. Signed and dated 1976 bottom left.

From the Frank Oehlschlaeger Gallery. 

Overall Size: 36 x 38 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 28 x 20 1/2 in. 

#8696 

Harry McVay was born in Sarasota, Florida in 1947. By the time he was twelve he was drawing regularly, and took private lessons with Roy Nichols, a recent graduate of Ringling School of Art, who inspired him to explore watercolors. After graduating from high school in 1965 he joined the United States Air Force, working as an illustrator for them. While stationed at Ogden, Utah in the Aerospace Audio-Visual Service he won his first award from a juried art show, solidifying his desire to pursue art fully. He spent several years stationed overseas in Turkey, where he learned to speak Turkish specifically in order to approach locals to sketch and use to practice painting. When he was discharged he returned to Sarasota and enrolled at Ringling himself, working in an art supply store on the side where he was able to immerse himself in many different mediums in private as well as in classes. He studied commercial and fine art, as well as photography, and had his first one man show at the Sarasota Art Association in 1972. He was responsible for the yearbook the following year, after which he transferred to the University of Florida in Gainesville, obtaining his BFA two years later. He spent the next twenty years moving throughout Florida, studying the flora and fauna, photographing and painting wherever he went, finding his biggest inspiration in the works of Andrew Wyeth and Winslow Homer and striving to capture the same atmosphere through scenes of his home state. In the late 1990s he moved into a home in Eden, Florida to care for a friend of the family, Mary Simon, and the two became inseparable. He took her with him wherever he went to paint, and she helped him organize new exhibitions of his work and find galleries for them, including the Frank Oehlschlaeger Gallery in his hometown of Sarasota. When she passed away in 2014 he moved to Jensen Beach on the east coast of Florida, where he continues to make art and offer classes at his studio.