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Jill Smith
Bryan McFarlane, Exploding Ordinance with Egg. Courtesy of the Artist.
Bryan McFarlane, Unexploded Ordinances. Courtesy of the Artist.Born and raised in Jamaica, and now currently living in the US, painter Bryan McFarlane maintains strong ties to his Jamaican cultural roots and Maroon ancestry. Runaway slaves who banded together against the white British colonials, the Jamaican Maroon community kept the oral, artistic, and historic traditions of their West African heritage alive. Drawing from the deep well of his identity as a source for his work, the artist looks to his upbringing and culture as a foundation of potency and strength.
Having traveled as a visiting artist to international institutions and residencies in locations including Europe, Turkey, Iran, South America, West Africa, and the Caribbean, he draws inspiration for his work from these extensive travels and the ways that diverse geographic locales work to reinforce a sense of his Jamaican heritage. He is most inspired by the natural light of each local, and how each place can be differentiated by its light.
Despite the infiltration of darkness into his oeuvre, his travels have made him keenly aware of the transformative and spiritual power of light. He writes, “My paintings are… meant to reflect the shrines and innermost sanctuaries of… those places. Under this inspiration, I depict in my art real and dream places or dark light, of light passages across the bridge between time and timelessness.”
Always traveling with a faded photograph of his parent’s wedding, an image both beautifully personal, but nonetheless trapped within a colonial aesthetic, an awareness of the implications of the history of colonialism follows him wherever he goes. As does a sense of the permanence and malleability of time itself. He is interested in the mystical qualities of time, and how these can transmute its rational and measurable attributes. He believes that cultural production, arts, and artifacts of diverse geographic locals can be used to subvert, morph, and veil the rational as well. He sees his work functioning in much the same way. He relies on his senses—sight, touch, and smell—to inform his understanding of cultural history.
Known for many years for his partly figurative, partly abstracted images that reconstructed the sacred spaces of the many places he had visited as well as evoked the painful legacy of the Middle Passage, his images evoked a Tintoretto—like murkiness through which diaphanous fields of glowing light emanated.
However, in his most recent series, The Egg Series, he has developed beyond this penchant for anthropology, moving into a purely formal realm of complete abstraction. His palette has undergone a transformation as well. From muddy darkness, his new work engages with fields of bright pastels—sherbet orange, goldenrod yellow, aquamarine, and silver—and a vocabulary of egg-shaped orbs that float and dance on the canvas like shimmering bubbles of water cascading downward in a soapy fountain. Working even more subconsciously and intuitively than ever before, the work takes on an organic and unrestrained quality of joy and light.
