Painting is an art as much concerned with what is left in as left out. Increasingly in Scott McFarlane’s paintings the simplicity and the delineation of line and tone is a direct consequence of reduction and then rendering what is essential about what remains. This approach has a spiritual purpose as well as symbolic consequence.

In the “Edmond Ruin” group of paintings McFarlane has taken one of the historic place sites of Kerikeri in Northland and treated it as deified. He has stripped the ‘essence’ of the building remnant to profile and shape and then through the linkage of a tightly controlled palette (black, grey, white) located it in time and space and imbued it with the importance of its own substance. The issues of architecture arise – questions of permanence and preservation – as much as the debates of value and physical presence.

McFarlane has now developed a symbolic language of objects in the sky. In “Whangaroa” there is the shape of St. Paul’s afloat in the mist and the elliptical pencil-thin presence of a poplar tree pointing to the heavens. In “Pohue Kaeo” the weeping mountain of Maungaemiemie (left) and Taratara (right) are linked offerings.