Barbara Macfarlane

Barbara Macfarlane is a painter of the land, and the variety of human experiences that shapes our relationships with it. Her large-scale works, typically executed in oil and ink, reveal both familiar and unexpected truths about our physical world, from the rugged, olive-clad hills of South-Eastern France, to the stringent, grid-like matrix of Manhattan. 

Drawing on elements of cartography and aerial imagery, Macfarlane seeks to reveal new insights into the essence of places, with her painterly process becoming a vessel for discovery and understanding. Transcending solely Western means of representing the environment, she also draws on the rich traditions of indigenous painting, rooted in lived and inherited experiences of the land, such as the bird’s-eye perspective of Aboriginal desert painting. Many of Macfarlane’s paintings hover at the edge of complete abstraction, encouraging viewers to imagine and evoke landscapes themselves. 

After graduating from Exeter School of Art in the early 1980s, Macfarlane established her reputation with emotive scenes of her native Sussex Coast, and the nearby French countryside. From early in her career, a distinct painterly language emerged: abbreviated forms and gestural marks which brilliantly conjure the drama of these expansive landscapes, with their contrasting elements of land, sky and water. 

Throughout her career, Macfarlane’s work has engaged with her father’s stories of traversing and exploring London as an errand boy: 

“He got to know his way around, learning the pattern of the streets and their names, noting all the churches and monuments.

He gradually created in his head his own map of the City of London.

Now nearly 100 years on I feel a connection with my father and his journeyings around the city.

In my London maps I remember my father. They are all dedicated to him.”

While working in India, Barbara established Khadi Papers, a paper mill in Karnataka, South India, specialising in exceptional handmade artist’s paper. Composed of repurposed cotton rag from t-shirt cuttings, the paper’s long fibres imbue it with an incredibly thick and individual tooth (or grain), making each piece entirely unique. This texture forms a crucial element of Barbara’s practice, working with and against her paintings to create an almost three-dimensional surface. 

Macfarlane’s work is held in significant private and corporate collections worldwide. She has exhibited widely across Europe, North America and Asia, including at the Royal Academy in London, and the Grand Palais in Paris.