A powerful force strains beneath the surface of Scott McFarlane’s dark and brooding landscapes. His exhibition, Night & Day in the Fields of Vision, is a powerful exploration of the artist’s intense emotional and physical response to the Otago landscape. Imbued with memory, myth and history, McFarlane’s paintings capture the overlapping realms of dream and reality.

There is a sense of gothic romance, stillness and isolation within McFarlane’s paintings that is at once melancholic and ominous. The dominant hills of the Otago landscape are immersed in history and charged with atmosphere through the artist’s use of dramatic chiaroscuro. In Dunedin and Dunedin NEV McFarlane scatters points of light across the darkened sepia hills and valleys, encapsulating the city as a remote and mysterious entity.

Often beginning his paintings in the open air, before completing them in his studio, McFarlane captures a direct visual impression of natural light and atmosphere. The resulting works are at once immediate and considered, giving the impression of being hewn from the land itself.

McFarlane explores the rawness of the landscape, building up thick textured layers of paint in earthy ochre tones. This underlying texture of the canvas “allows objects to emerge that are unexpected.” (1) Half seen figures and faces waiting in the shadows transpire from dreams and are transposed upon the landscape. In At Whareakeake (Murderer’s Dream), faces loom in the mists above the coastal cliffs while in Curtain, a figure watches concealed behind draped fabric.

McFarlane allows us to view the land with new eyes. Capturing a multiplicity of meaning and content with ease, his depiction of the Otago topography is both competent and compelling. “I am walking over well-covered ground. The area is steeped in New Zealand literature and art history. It is finding my own language within the landscape that is important.” (2)

1. Artist Statement, 2005.
2. Ibid.