Contributed photo
'Study of Kathy', watercolour on rag paper.Sana Rose, Contributor
On November 13, Bryan McFarlane presented his second offering of "Minus 2000" to the Jamaican public. Like the first part of the exhibition held in 1999, the current exhibition of works is influenced by his travels. This time around however, his source of inspiration is Ghana in Africa, which he says, transported him back to his childhood roots in Jamaica.
Born one of seven children in Moore Town, Portland, in 1956, Bryan continues to refer to his Maroon heritage as a significant part of his being despite the "significant alienation I feel towards my country while still abroad."
Somewhat of a child prodigy, Bryan sat the O'/A' Level Art examinations in third form along with fifth and sixth form students and received high distinctions. This brought much encouragement from those around him which he said, stroked his ego with comments such as "Bwoy Bryan, yuh can draw eeh?"
By the end of fourth form, and on the verge of age 15, he left high school and went to the Jamaica School of Art (now Edna Manley School of Visual Arts). Later he received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London but due to financial constraints, he left London and went to the United States and gained his Master of Fine Arts Degree at the Massachusetts College of Art. He became an artist-in-residence at Northeastern University, a position he has held for about 18 years now.
The urge to travel and see other places come through his exposure to many artists which etched a desire in him to learn more about other countries. Bryan noted that although early Modern artists spread their wings further afield from their native homes to seek "a more primitive and primal way of understanding art" by going outside of their culture, he already had this primal existence in Jamaica. He desired however, to understand "what is Western because it had influenced and transformed the Caribbean and parts of South America over several hundred years."
He says he is "interested in finding and looking at the aspects of that transformation and how I could connect and relate (to it) in a deep way and yet not be destroyed by that transformation." This feeling led him to ancient places and sacred spaces such as shrines and old churches in Brazil, the Southeast of France, Turkey, Spain and Ghana which he refers to as the sources, the roots in terms of art history and by extension, life.
Bryan said that his aim was "To decipher (and) extract a larger vision and meaning and underscore my vision regarding what I would paint, to expand on my definition of art and its contemporary and theoretical trends and (my) understanding of it; to be able to talk about it and to be able to feel, to see it, to touch it in a different way." Bryan's passion for time as it relates to generations, tradition, history, memory and sensory perception in the realm of experience, past and present, are all clear and fluid in dialogue with him.
Surprisingly, this fluidity and clarity are absent from his present exhibition. Bryan defends this by saying that, "There are a lot of intervals that are not in this show and I don't think a show should be about giving links to people necessarily." In fact, he refers to the work in this exhibition as snippets of ideas from a diary. But the disjointed pictorial themes, which may have been amplified by the organisation of the works in the gallery, have defeated the intensity that would have made the exhibition more impacting.
From ceremonial symbols to the wedding photograph to the nudes, Bryan has not defined the relationship of these works to each other. If the contrasts are meant to be purposeful, the outcome is not so. The first part of "Minus 2000" showed works that dealt with symbols from the various cultures he visited and his interest in light, which seemed to consecrate the space of the paintings.
In the present exhibition, Bryan told The Sunday Gleaner he is looking at light as awareness in the way that one would shed light on a situation. The autobiographical nature of the works, signal a step forward from the last exhibition but he has not investigated this idea sufficiently and therefore has not really shed light on his vision or his deepened sense of identity. The use of the grid, which was less pronounced in work from the last exhibition, has now become a central idea in many of the paintings but again this idea, whether thematic or formal or both, has not been developed in the work.
There is the obvious physical time consuming rendering of such images especially when one looks at the large scale of the works but beyond that, the grid fails to really activate the space of the images although Bryan says his aim is to make the space more complex to become "measured fragmentation". In other works, where the grid is less pronounced or not used at all, the composition functions better when the images are not cluttered in the space as is the case with 'Bird Icons' and 'Pots' with 'Egg Icons' as opposed to the space in 'Balmyard I' and 'Fruit Icons'. What weakens the work further are the disproportionate figures which betray his skill and eye for detail.
Bryan wishes to tap into his own primal senses - his basic senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing and sight - stimulated by memory and experience but the extent to which he stimulates the viewer through these "timeless technologies" as he refers to them, is limited by his lack of sufficient preparation for this exhibition. This also betrays his skill but moreso, his vision. He admits that he had to temporarily abandon his original idea due to time constraints but says that he will be and has been investigating these various ideas in this exhibition in his studio. This exhibition sits on a gold mine of content and imagery and if Bryan seriously gives these ideas the attention they deserve, his next exhibition will truly be a feast for all the primal senses and a powerful experience of the artist's vision. The exhibition continues until December 7.
