Bryan McFarlane

 A Jamaican by birth and an energetic traveller in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, Bryan McFarlane has become identified with works that invoke and reconstruct sacred spaces that he has visited on his many travels. His paintings, exhibited internationally and nationally at the Institute of Contemporary Art here in Boston and at his home since the 1980s, glow with light and evoked places of suffering and prayer, as if to summon before us the reality of sacredness in the world.

When asked about his 2012 show, My Dragon's Silk Road, McFarlane stated: I feel much of my way of seeing has been transformed by my travels [to China], encountering the dragon spirit that possesses most, if not all, of the inhabitants of China.  The surfaces [of my art] are tactile as human emotions are tactile. Tactile surfaces reinforce the real in our relationship with humans and nature and our viewing psychology.  My paintings are an immediate reaction to all my embodied fears, love, sensuality, meditation on peace and freedom and an unabated enjoyment of ones body and its complex senses.

This departs from his past work which "were based on idiosyncratically describing an experience, wooing the viewer into various states.  These new paintings have become less self-conscious and are more about immediacy--less about description or mere illustration."