Face Value
MaLin Wilson Powell
Isn’t it about time that Patrick McFarlin has a museum retrospective? Considering his current
installation Obits and (Mini) Masterpieces is such an obvious look back at dead artists whose
“ghosts” came into his studio, surely, it is a good time to recapitulate his own career trajectory.
McFarlin has always struck me as a quintessentially American narrative painter, and this project
definitely shows off his facilities as a draughtsman and gestural colorist to the max.
He says of the ghosts who visited, they “marched out of the dark in random order. Who’s next? An
artist here and one there, then come art historians, critics, museum directors, collectors.” All of them
were featured on an Art in America Annual Guide Obituary page, a single-page line up of those
considered last year’s most significant dead. For example, the 2010 guide featured 20 luminaries with
thumbnail photos and a one or two-sentence distillation of significance, the youngest Dash Snow, 27
years of age, and the oldest Merce Cunningham and Frederick Hammersley, both 90. You always
wonder: Who decides?
McFarlin had his first solo New Mexico exhibition at Linda Durham’s gallery in 1985. Those
abstract/figurative paintings were exuberant, expressionist, ambitious, and serious. They displayed
a virtuoso painterliness that was clearly a legacy from New York School giants Gorky, De
Kooning, Kline and Tworkov. McFarlin has said he was “launched” as a teenager by the famous
Art News magazine series of New York School artists in process, e.g., De Kooning, Tworkov, and
Pollock “. . . Paints a Picture.”
By my count, McFarlin is exhibiting obituary portraits of 34 art world personalities, 27 of them
artists. Overall the graphite “Obits” are ghostly line drawing renditions on white 11 x 14 inch
Bristol board. The vivacity and presence of the artists arise from McFarlin’s fluid line. Below each
face is hand-printed the reductive magazine description. The one exception is a bold, colorful,
jump-off-the-page “Wally Hedrick” obit of a “Beat generation and Funk artist whose work ranges
from abstract canvases to assemblages of urban debris.” Wally Hedrick (1928-2003) was a groundbreaking, irreverent, larger-than-life Bay Area artist, who had a job in a North beach bar during the
1940s painting four to five canvases each night to the sounds of jazz. Hedrick is the essential
California Funk artist, a big man on the scene when McFarlin was finding his maturity as an
artist. It was in San Francisco that McFarlin’s work in two 1969 exhibitions - “Explosive Cartoons”
and “The Hot Rod Esthetic ”- was singled out for praise by the well-known art critic Thomas
Albright.
Portraits have been a part of McFarlin’s lexicon since the 1960s when he did a series of brushy,
psychological portraits, while attending Little Rock University (now Univ. of Arkansas). Who can
forget him painting portraits in his 1997 SITE Santa Fe exhibition, “Pat’s Downtown Club”? This
boisterous, cumulative portrait of Santa Feans began as a way to introduce art talk into the solitude
of his studio process, a means of conversation about the art world he loves to talk about. Unlike
Warhol, who turned commissioned portraits into his cash cow, McFarlin has always refused
commissions.
McFarlin’s Obituary “ghosts” bring to mind a lineage of celebrity headshots, beginning with the
annual broadsides published by Nadar, the 19th century Parisian photographer. Another iteration is
Warhol’s 1968 “Ten Most Wanted” FBI-listed American criminals. As is often the case with
Warhol, the ultimate celebrity portraitist, his “Ten Most Wanted” is a clever double entendre, a
visual pun. After all, don’t artists want to be the most wanted of all? And there is also Gerhard
Richter’s “48 Portraits” (1971-72) painted panels with identically framed heads of famous men he
drew from an encyclopedia.
According to the accompanying catalog, McFarlin was not sure what to do with his ghost
portraits, other than give them equal billing with a standardized format. “Eventually an old idea
connected itself to the drawings – the idea of representing existing, iconic paintings. Taking a
composition and condensing it. Distilling it. Reworking it. Covering it, the way a musician plays
and interprets a score. Like singing that old well-written tune.”
Among the artists McFarlin “covered” are expressionist painters Willem De Kooning, Francis
Bacon, Robert Motherwell, Richard Pousette-Dart, Richard Diebenkorn, Theodore Stamos, Larry
Rivers, Joan Mitchell, along with the more unlikely Pop maestro Roy Lichtenstein and
“Happenings” artist Allan Kaprow. McFarlin’s Mini “covers” are for the most part inspired, small
Re-creations of large canvasses. Joan Mitchell (1922-1992) has three Obits, each hanging with two
or three miniature oil on paper versions. Mitchell is a gestural painter of magnificent, monumental
canvases, that are viscerally charged, offering an experience far beyond her art world identification
as a second generation Abstract Expressionist.
McFarlin’s Mini Masterpiece “covers” are of a different order than the work of appropriation
artists, or the meticulous models of Richard Pettibone, who has made a 40-year practice of
reproducing in meticulous detail copies of the work by his heroes Duchamp and Warhol. So, how
to explain McFarlin’s marvelous miniature paintings? Di they function as little portraits of aging
modernist paintings, an era that valorized the emotionally expressive brush stroke? Throughout his
career, McFarlin has been an active citizen in the 500-year dialog of individual artists working in
their studios, thrilled by the possibilities of paint. For now, it seems best to take McFarlin’s own
words at face value “. . . this gets me back where I want to be—into paint—conducting a very small
orchestra with my pigment on a stick.”
If you ask me, a McFarlin retrospective would need to include early funky cartoons, his
haunting late 1980s boat paintings, his bronze figures along with out takes of his hilarious audio
gallery guides to his own shows, and, always, his rural landscapes vibrating with magic hour light.