"When is Now"

"When is Now" refers to the impossibility of holding onto 'now', or the moment, as well as implying that everything is happening in that moment. My paintings reflect my interest in the ambiguities and chaos inherent to passing time. They aren't definitive statements or attempts to capture moments. Rather, they exist in a state of formation, even as they are finished pieces.

For this new body of work, I've employed a loosened, wet-on-wet technique to produce networks of sometimes dense, layered fields of color in my new compositions. This technique allows for a wide spectrum of color and brushstroke complexity from one layer to another, creating shifts in depth without the use of traditional perspective.

Also different is the use of rectangular canvases. In the past, I've relied on a mostly square format, but recently I've re-incorporated the horizontal and vertical into my studio practice. The format change allows for the expansion of forms across the painted field creating a sense of movement and an open-ended
emotional space for the viewer to explore.

Tim McFarlane: "Moving Into Deeper Water" Essay by Roberta Fallon, 2007
Tim McFarlane's abstract paintings have always concerned themselves with people, place and the flow of energy in the world. In his new works, the artist enters cosmic territory creating the ambiance of life itself coming at you, many-layered and beautiful, in a steady unstoppable flow.

McFarlane's abstract paintings have changed over the years from geometric meta-landscapes to these new works with their loosely-knit veils of color. What's common through the years is the sense of humanity expressed through the artist's touch which is ever present and through the vocabulary of repeat shapes that suggest communities, swarms and masses of individuals living side by side and breathing in parallel through time immemorial.

McFarlane is an exquisite colorist, and his palette is full of radical and unexpected moves. Pass, 2007, couples mango, mint green, warm pinks and blood reds. It sounds chaotic but it works. He's especially good layering white on top of darker shades making it zing and at the same time a foil for the deeper shades. Tintoretto the Italian Renaissance master drew with white on top of black, knowing white's power. In our time, Robert Ryman too creates white veils and Sean Scully pits white against dark in his checkerboard paintings. But McFarlane has found a way to make white his own through his vocabulary of almost calligraphic shapes and his great color sense.

The artist's studio is like a science laboratory and the artist is like an explorer. McFarlane works big, small, thin, thick, and, here in this show, translucent and juicy with glimpses of unprimed canvas. The artist loves the process as much as the product.

The delight for the viewer who slows down and peers into the interstices is the glimpse of the great beyond, what lies just out of sight, the greener grass, the holy grail, something beautiful, mysterious, and worth looking for. Some may see frustration in the heavy veils and peekaboo affect of the works. But to me the artist is raising the issue of the importance of seeing beyond the veil and the satisfaction of exploring and moving into deeper waters.

McFarlane's quiet and affirmative works suggest the richness of life - past, present and future - pulsing together in the cosmos.

--Roberta Fallon is a Philadelphia artist and writer who co-founded the popular art blog roberta fallon and libby rosof's artblog, http://fallonandrosof.blogspot.com

Tim McFarlane: Essay by Lilly Wei
Tim McFarlane is a young abstract painter, a designation considered an oxymoron by some, an endangered species by others. McFarlane himself disregards both attitudes, more engaged in the practice of painting than theories about it. In the most recent examples of this practice, all from 2004 and 2005, McFarlane, a Philadelphia-based artist, has re-considered his syntax, his broad Sean Scully-like stripes and compositions shifting into smaller, laddered units, resulting in more disjunctive, nimble arrangements. Based on modernist grids deconstructed and deracinated, with some of the freedom of graffiti, his proliferating, superimposed systems and webs recall scaffolds, schematized skylines, tenement walls, multi-windowed corporate facades or other, undesignated urban structures. Curiously, a number of these constructs also suggest trees, or other organic entities, blending a sense of the natural with the geometric. Light in tone, the hues cool and warm, even hot at times, the primaries just off, black (for anchorage) and white (for light), color and form are tightly partnered as these exuberant, rhythmic pictures rock to some syncopated city beat.

McFarlane's exhilarating abstractions are both referential and not-a not unusual contemporary strategy-with titles that squeeze in narrative as well as description such as Raw Nerve, Intervening Dream, A Dream Askew, Free State. Another is Pink Baby!!! (a distant relative of Matisse's Pink Nudes) a funny, self-assembled, robot-like figure in bright pink, waving what might be arms and legs, but still more abstract than anime. Some of these paintings also refer to the artist's earlier canvases, quoting his previous stripe paintings as a motif. Clean, complex, with lovely passages of loose brushwork and increasingly assured, McFarlane's engaging abstractions are urban studies that depict civilization and its contents with humour, irony and above all, invigorating, blissful energy.

Lilly Wei

Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who writes for several publications in the United States and abroad. A frequent contributor to Art in America , she is also a contributing editor at ARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.

Tim McFarlane: Essay by Gerard Brown
At first blush, the paintings that comprise Tim McFarlane's "Inverted Dislocation" exhibit might seem a tad abstracted. Not abstract, but abstracted…as one might describe someone who is preoccupied in a conversation. On the one hand they are rigorously formal, like intelligent newcomers to the ongoing conversation of pattern painting (and its specific discussion of the stripe). But, at the same time, they seem to have something else on their minds.

That something else is life itself. Though overtly nonrepresentational, McFarlane's striped blocks inevitably suggest images. It would be simple to stop at their resemblance to the blank urban-modernist-dumb-box-office-building architecture that hems in Philadelphia pedestrians. More specifically, these fields are obstacles; they conceal what is behind them and impede the long view. For McFarlane, like many of us who are struggling to make sense of our day-to-day lives, says "the future is over there somewhere" beyond reach, behind some towering barrier.

Patterns - like checks, stripes, and such - are happy things for painters. They could go on forever, they fill canvas quickly, and they don't require a lot of thought. Using them allows a painter to turn our attention to details like edges and slight variations from uniformity. Without imagery, we have to look elsewhere for content. Attending to McFarlane's paintings, one will rather quickly notice the absence of any governing formulae. Lines vary in width; stripes blur into one another. Peek around the corners of a canvas and you'll get a look at how many color decisions go into making a single passage of cool gray or warm white. What drives these paintings - as patterned as they are - is not any sort of system but a keen interest in sensation. When a painting "feels right" it has passed the litmus test for McFarlane. Even the paintings' titles (an example from this group of images is the plaintively titled "Between You and I" which at once signals intimacy and some kind of distance threatening to block communication) are more expressive than formal . This subjectivity - a willingness to be surprised by a painting's growth rather than to adhere to a fixed plan - further locates these paintings in the world of the day-to-day, rather than in the timeless empyrean of art.

A second body of work in the current exhibition, remotely inspired by images of architecture under empty skies, continues McFarlane's investigations of painterly and emotional spaces. In these compositions, lushly layered blocks of color squeeze thin ribbons of paint across the bottom edges of a canvas. The effect, which McFarlane notes echoes Dutch "big sky" landscapes of the 17th century, is one in which the viewer feels the weight of air and its openness. Is this availability, this unobstructed sky, really any more attainable than that which is concealed? Perhaps not.

Though Tim McFarlane's paintings imply barriers, challenges, and open spaces perhaps too full of potential to be really useful, they also encourage us to keep looking up. It would be easy to talk about paintings in terms of paintings than in terms of vision, but in this case, I fear it would be not only too easy (and academic), but cowardly. In his abstractions, Tim McFarlane boldly seeks what is out of sight and hidden from view. At the core of their strategy of concealment is a faith that there is something out there to pursue.

gerard brown, Philadelphia, 2004