Patient Spotlight – Artist Tim McFarlane

by Jennifer Gallagher | Aug 13, 2024 | Blog

Our Team is blessed to serve such an incredible group of patients. Over the years we have had the opportunity to develop a deep relationship with so many of our patients, and we truly love hearing stories about their families, travels, bucket lists, new endeavors, charities, talents, and big events. We decided that we could not keep these stories to ourselves and are shining a “spotlight” on the some of the amazing things our patients are doing. This week our spotlight shines on local artist, Tim McFarlane whose passion for art started at a very early age. Here is Tim’s story.

I was born and raised in Philadelphia, where I currently reside and maintain a studio. I was an only child and spent a lot of time alone, but had a very active imagination. One of my habits that did not thrill my mother was collecting broken toy parts found on the street, bring them home to make random “sculptures” with. Like a lot kids, I read a lot of comics and would attempt to draw some of the superhero figures, while making all sorts of random art-like things. It wasn’t until high school that I thought of pursuing art as a life-long endeavor. In high school and most of college, I studied and learned art in a very traditional manner, forming a foundation studying color, form, composition, etc… with still life, figurative and landscape subjects. Some of my early influences were Old Masters, especially Caravaggio and Rembrandt, then came Monet, Cezanne, Abstract Expressionists and more contemporary artists I learned about in school and after, like Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Susan Rothenberg, Richard Diebenkorn, Jack Whitten, the list goes on. Gradually, my interests turned to ideas and concepts where depicting the world around me directly wasn’t enough and I moved to abstraction. Although my work doesn’t depict specific objects, people or places, my work is still based on my observations of and engagement with the natural and man-made environments.

My artistic practice is rooted in painting, but I also make murals and installations. Photography and digital experiments also informs my work. Themes in my work are wide-ranging, but focus primarily on ideas about the unreliability of memory, the passage of time and the residual affects of human activity on man-made environments (public and semi-public spaces). I’m curious about what is and isn’t noticed about our surroundings and how, largely anonymously, people transform public spaces through continuous communications through graffiti or other marks, that’s in a continuous loop of being buffed out (painted over) and replaced by more graffiti, posters, etc… In one of my series, Soft Poems, I use glyphs that are meant to resemble letter-like symbols in multi-layered paintings where grids of glyphs overlap, like a visual interpretation of many voices overlapping in conversation, some less noticeable, some hidden completely or partially. Similar to what I see in some public spaces with all sorts of marks on streets, walls and the mix of materials like concrete, metals, plastics and more co-existing in the same place, alluding to the existence of human beings who change their environments constantly.

From April 2nd-May 18th of 2024, I had my sixth solo exhibition with the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, titled, “All Of This Is True”. Three paintings from that show, as well as an older piece are currently on display in the lobby of the Sheraton Philadelphia-Downtown, located at 201 North 17th Street in center city Philadelphia. This fall, I will have a solo exhibition at the Mercer County Community College in West Windsor Township, New Jersey. More information will be forthcoming via my monthly studio newsletter: Tim McFarlane Studio Newsletter.