Patrick McFarlin: Lost & Found
Patrick McFarlin: Lost & Found
September 18 - October 2, 2021
Described as a quintessentially American narrative painter, McFarlin is a brilliant draughtsman and gestural colorist. The exhibition “Lost & Found” draws lines of interest between McFarlin’s past and new works, and between personal inspirations from Van Gogh and Pissarro.
The show was a tribute to one of New Mexico’s most accomplished artists.
“Lost & Found” featured new work exploring the subject of the painter on the plein air path. The exhibition also included a retrospective selection of McFarlin’s poetic Irish landscapes, as well as works from his series Scratches on the Wall.
In recent months, McFarlin has been revisiting Van Gogh and making art inspired by his work: “My paintbrush received a big push by the rediscovery of a work from 1972— a maquette for an art billboard based on Van Gogh’s Bridge at Arles. In 2020, I began revisiting Vincent and making art tangential to his body of work. At first drawings on a small scale then life-size drawings of the painter on the plein air path and eventually even larger murals on my studio walls.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Arkansas, McFarlin went on to study at the Memphis College of Art, University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1960s. His first solo show was in San Francisco in 1968, and he's mounted countless others since then, from New York City to Houston. McFarlin had his first New Mexico solo exhibition at Linda Durham’s gallery in 1985. His then abstract/figurative paintings were “exuberant, expressionist, ambitious and serious. They displayed a virtuoso painterliness that was clearly a legacy from New York School giants Gorky, De Kooning, Kline, and Tworkov,” per art historian MaLin Wilson-Powell. In 1990, he moved to Santa Fe, where he worked for four years on a SITE project painting over three-hundred portraits of people in the city that were exhibited at SITE Santa Fe, contemporary art center and museum
Patrick McFarlin in his studio
View exhibition video here.
