Wedding 婚礼

“At the outset of his career, McFarlane was a figurative artist. Although his art is now largely inclined toward abstraction, he has never abandoned figuration. In The Wedding, for example, he reinvents a long-ago family event deriving his images from an old photograph that he converts into digitalized forms. From a figurative starting point, he used tiny blocks of muted color to dematerialize the figures converting them ultimately into a totally abstract field of colored squares or pixels. Of course, you could also view the series of six panels stacked in columns of two in reverse, that is, as the progressive revelation of the marriage scene from ‘pixelized’ abstraction to representational clarity. In either case, this remarkable multi-panel work is visually fascinating. It is probable that the approach explored in The Wedding owes inspiration in some measure to the watercolorist Richard Yarde, who also breaks his forms into small fields of colors often akin to pixels. In a more recent painting–Sorting out Perceptions I, II and III, McFarlane has returned to figurative elements–including a self-portrait–integrated with other icons and motifs widely used in his abstract art.”

– Barry Gaither Director of the Museum of the National Center of African Artists, Boston