Dedee Shattuck Gallery is pleased to present Jamie Young and Bryan McFarlane. This exhibit pairs two established oil painters who explore the identity of place. The exhibit runs July 30th through August 24th, with the artists’ reception on Saturday, August 16 from 5-7pm.

Jamie Young lives and works in Ashfield Massachusetts, a Berkshire community known for incubating talented artists. Her studio is in a beautifully refurbished building on her horse farm, but she often loads up her truck bed with her easel and paint to travel through the rolling hills and hay meadows capturing the light and landscape. She is a studio painter by practice, but often sketches and paints studies for her large canvases en plein-air. Young seeks to capture the feeling of a place and the quality of light rather than creating a formal representational landscape painting, embedded in her images of flora are observations of climate change. Her works are energized and gestural, representing the passion with which she captures the beauty of her surroundings. She is particularly attracted to wild vines enveloping leafy trees, bows dipping into rippling rivers, and sunlight shimmering on foliage. This exhibit will feature a selection of Ashfield paintings, as well as paintings of our own Westport, Massachusetts. Her unique perspective, warm golden color palette, and energetic painting style will enliven our walls for the month of August.

Bryan McFarlane is a Boston painter and a professor at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. McFarlane splits time painting his large scale, semi abstract, oils between his studio off of Harrison Avenue in Boston, and one in China. McFarlane was born in Jamaica, and has travelled extensively including to his father’s home country of Ghana. Whether he is in Jamaica, Ghana, China, Boston, or Dartmouth Massachusetts, McFarlane is always examining the arts and expressive styles of his surroundings. He then synthesizes them in dynamic compositions that are inspired by these varied creative environments, but also take on themes of identity, climate change, and globalization. His works are abstract, but contain occasional representational elements, depicted in a style that draws from Caribbean, West African and Boston painting techniques.

Bryan McFarlane and Jamie Young

Wednesday, July 30th through Sunday, August 24th

Artists’ reception Saturday, August 16th from 5:00 -7:00 p.m.

Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 10-5pm, Sunday 12-5pm

Jamie Young

I have been painting since I was very little. In my teen years I started painting landscapes.
The theme remains the same. I just keep trying to make it clearer and simpler. Often the scenes I paint are very small vignettes that I would pass by most days, but caught in a certain light they come alive. It has been said my paintings are like glimpses of landscapes, images of fleeting moments.

I love both working in the field and in the studio. I find that they feed each other. I use pencil, pastel, watercolor and oils. Switching from one medium to another keeps each fresh and I am able to discover more, carrying over, technique to technique. The medium I choose depends on the location and conditions. If I can get my truck or boat to the painting site I will work plein-air. I always carry pencil and paper with me and often use the sketches to paint in my studio large oils on canvases that would be too awkward to take into the field.

Driving or walking along, what makes me stop and paint is the light, atmosphere, composition and most of all the Stillness. The Stillness of the Earth is something that we all see and have a need to be with. Painting and drawing are ways for me to concentrate on the Stillness and be more aware, centered and energized. My job is to pass it on.

This quote was a favorite of Edward Hopper’s and it resonates with me:

“Look until you become fascinated; trust that you will see something. If you learn to wait, the objects will slowly sink into your consciousness and they will acquire a significance that can be measured in color and feeling…”

-Goethe

Bryan McFarlane

I have a long and committed interest in the intersection of the practice of art making, art history and contemporary critical discussion. As an artist, I have been fortunate to receive several previous grants that allowed me to travel extensively to Brazil; Columbia; West Africa; Turkey; Japan and China to engage in international discourse regarding art history, art production and criticism. My engagement with the arts is also an intellectual endeavor. At every point, I have sought not simply to create art, but to understand the implications and possibilities for art within art history, criticism and philosophy as an intrinsic part of ‘travel’ for art production

China has recently become a very special part of my journey-for the last seven years. I believe this time, it is one which will unquestionably define a most important period of my life’s work as an artist/painter. Having initially set up studio residency at the Red Gate Gallery for over two months during the summer of 2007. From this juncture, I took the opportunity to create a series of work entitled “egg series”. Using Egg as metaphor, and the myriads of African cosmogony, stories I learned, while living in Ghana. Constrasting those stories with the ‘Silkroad Myths’ of China, as metaphor while looking at “biginnings” and survival of these nations/peoples up until now. I thus created a body of work on large scale canvas leading up to my current themes. In a special way, this experience feels like a familiar one, having grown up with numerous friends during my formative years in Jamaica with large numbers of extended family members who were Chinese. (Jamaica has a large population of third generation Chinese immigrants who are well established since the turn of the 19th century, of which group has firmly assimilated, contributing to important economic, political and socio-cultural life of Jamaica and the Caribbean.)

While the country of my birth, offers an excellent setting for a sustained examination of my art and Chinese culture, I feel being on the ‘Mainland’ has created powerful inspiration and implications for my work. My work in China thus far has been one of the most productive periods of my creative life. The world is changing drastically as China plays a major role. I continue to study their artistic traditions, their history and participate with ongoing dialogues in their cultural institutions and society. I have gone ahead through this vision and inspiration to set up part of my current studio practice, for the duration, as it’s environment helps to shape concepts that might lead to the creation of new and more fresh and unique work. In anticipation of discussions needed to under gird the type of innovative art making I often visualize. A launching board for my current work to engage in the greater part of East Asia and the expanded contemporary art scene which China is now a major player.

Scholars alike are presently witnessing the transformation of global visual art expression as the continents of Africa, South America, the Caribbean – even Jamaica, spew forth waves of new artists towards a journey to East Asia.