Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

Barbara Macfarlane is a landscape painter with a great feeling for the drama of wide-open spaces, for the contrasting elements of land and sea and sky, for how they take the light, for how they meet and merge. And she searches out these things across a wide variety of terrains, from the coastline of West Sussex to the sun-flooded hills of the South of France, from the Greek islands to the Outer Hebrides.  Her medium is paint on paper. The two elements share an almost equal importance in her work. Working often on a large scale, she makes the vital textures of her hand-made rag-papers play a leading part in the creation of each image. Although large in scale, there is nothing formal about these pictures. They retain the immediacy and the intensity of those first sketches, a sense of movement and change, an enjoyment of the painting process and, above all, a sense of closeness to the land. Macfarlane, indeed, often uses sticks and other found objects picked up on her sketching trips to make marks on the paper. Macfarlane’s art strives always to capture the essence of the landscape. Rich in their simplicity, unflinching in their directness, her paintings seem to be a part of the very world that they record.

Summer Beach is Macfarlane’s first solo exhibition at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery after continued success in internationally renowned art fairs such as Art London, Melbourne Art Fair and Art Hamptons.