Bio:

Don McCartney hails from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His earliest memories were formed there and in Memphis. His high school years were in Belleville, Illinois, 1960–1964, where the idea of making art as a career came more into focus.

Attending Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL, Don graduated in 1968 with honors and an A.A. in Commercial Design. Following his first professional design job in St. Louis, he ventured to San Francisco in the spring of 1970. It was there that uncanny timing met life-changing opportunity when he landed a job in the art department of Rolling Stone magazine. This experience opened up a whole new world and led to other editorial design and production work along the way: Earth Times magazine, Rags magazine, Straight Arrow Books, and serving as art director of the startup environmental magazine Clear Creek. These publications were either Rolling Stone properties or spin-offs by former Rolling Stone staff. The times, they were a changin’.

And change they did. Don became Art Director for Francis Ford Coppola’s City magazine in 1973, followed by a two-year stint as Art Director of U.C. Berkeley’s California Monthly alumni magazine. He later held positions as Senior Designer, Art Director, and Design Director at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle (1977–2002), earning numerous national awards for editorial design innovation from the Society of Newspaper Design.

Leaving newspapers in 2002, he established Don McCartney Graphic Arts, with clients ranging from contemporary ballet to the American Distilling Institute. More recently, he has been responsible for branding the Sausalito Center for the Arts (SCA) and Marin Open Studios (MOS) in Marin County. He has designed and produced the MOS Tour Guide and advertising campaigns (2012–2024) and continues to design the printed program for the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival. He and his wife, artist Kay Carlson, live in San Rafael, CA.

Don later began a series of abstract watercolor paintings as a response to a group of failed plein air studies. Painting freely with no intention or expectation, he thought of the work as creating a “color garden,” from which he harvested only the ripest areas. By digitally scanning small patches at high resolution, he greatly enlarged sections for printing. Using a photographer’s lupe to magnify detail and explore surfaces, he became fascinated by the intricate engravings on paper currency. This inspired him to combine elements of money with his watercolors to create original, limited-edition Giclée prints of women on currency. The women originally appeared on stock certificates. Don layered the imagery in Photoshop and digitally printed the pieces using archival inks and paper. The watercolor layer brought new life and color to the otherwise monochromatic currency. This series evolved into a range of multi-layered, money-inspired editions of original prints.

— Don McCartney, 2025

 don@donmccartney.com – https://www.donmccartney.com · 925-708-0653