ABOUT:

Paintings of Iceland, its' coastline, glaciers and rugged terrain by abstract landscape artist Barbara Macfarlane.

Barbara’s works are better described as paintings from landscape rather than paintings of landscape. The place is important but it is perhaps not the true subject of her paintings which as she has said are “about shape, colour and balance”. This description might give the impression that her work is introspective or at the very least self referential.  But the inspiration for the shapes and the colours is the landscape and in the sense that these paintings celebrate what is seen in the world they can certainly be described as landscapes.

Iceland is the starting off point for this series of paintings. Barbara visited the country in the summer of 2007, travelling to the Snaefellesnes peninsula in the north west and to  Myrdalsjokull and Skaftafell in the south and east.  The strangeness of Iceland’s landscape, its almost lunar feeling, finds expression in the work.  There are the vast stretches of black sand on beaches that seem to go on forever.  At Breioamerkursandur the black sand is studded with massive blue or white or clear blocks of ice which have broken from the glacier, drifted out to sea and returned on the incoming tide.  On another glacier, Solheimajokull, dispersed randomly over its grey, cracked and pitted surface are hundreds of cones of ice.  On the outside they are black from a coating of volcanic grit, on the inside a startling chemical blue. 

All this is strange enough.  But there is also the unsettling quality of the northern light, the nights that in the summer never come, the dusk that turns slowly back to daylight.  And related to this experience the sense that in winter these landscapes remain hidden in almost perpetual darkness, a darkness which occasionally erupts into the greens and purples of the aurora borealis.

And so as a starting point the strangeness, the blackness, the blue and white shapes find their way into the paintings.  The bigger works in this series are oil on linen, and oil with black ink on rag paper.  The smaller pieces are drawn with oil stick on handmade paper which has been prepared on the surface with a ground of lapis lazuli.

Kitty Shepherd's new series of flatware bowls and platters take their inspiration from the fish in th frozen seas around Iceland and how they might look in the light through the water. They are deep fish in every sense of the word, unseen, until now.

ARTISTS:
Barbara Macfarlane Oil on handmade paper
Kitty Shepherd Ceramics