The Alfred Barnes Series

When Great paintings of the past become museumized they seem to become objects-sacred, rare and worth millions. In this process they also lose their original value as statements: they become valued objects. With this in mind, McGivern has rendered these objects with her own personal approach to painting. These are not copies of paintings, but paintings of paintings, imbued with overtones of the irony involved. Her works, then have become a statement. In the meantime she has also learned a lot about paintings, as did Matisse and his contemporaries when they went to the Louvre to do extrapolations of earlier masters.
— Graham Coughrty, January 1995, Toronto, Canada