Bryan McFarlane
Professor of Painting and Drawing, UMass Dartmouth
Like the Weather, 2015
Oil on canvas

Microbes conversely inspire exploration and expression of immensity and minuteness as they constitute microscopic communities or cloud formations. Both of these extremes are inseparable elements for human life and the natural world and are so elemental, so fundamental to our physical and spiritual lives, that they are recurrent in my ‘metaphoric’ and artistic expression. I have sought to create a series of large paintings which characterize the subtle and yet overwhelming changes that we experience through weather patterns, as well as the dramatic changes that might occur in our weather systems, directly attributed to climate change, caught almost as ‘stills’ - geometric, horizontal contours when broken down to paint gestures.

Space is an endless phenomenon laid bare to be studied for an artist or scientist or even the psychologist or psychoanalyst. Still, Space is a big mystery to me. When one takes a rectangular picture plain to compose or 'create space,’ it must encompass the universe, however minute. Landscape does that for me right now as space above and below us is endless, governed largely by ocean, land and sky. All my depicted pictorial elements are meant to float like clouds in the paintings I am trying to create.