Reprinted from The Daily Gazette, article by Brian McElhiney
Elizabeth MacFarland didn’t really plan on sharing her paintings with the world.
The Schenectady native, who lives in Niskayuna, first began painting in 2001 as a hobby to occupy her time when she wasn’t teaching piano in her home studio. She has a master’s in piano from Temple University in Philadelphia, where she lived until moving back to the area in 1990.
But MacFarland couldn’t keep her art to herself for too long. Her first show was at the Schenectady Civic Playhouse in October of 2006. Since that time, she has sold a handful of paintings and done portraits on commission.
In October of last year, MacFarland completed her largest piece yet, “The Sorrow of Sophia.” The painting made its debut at the Niskayuna Starbucks that month, as a tie-in with Bill McKibben’s environmental website www.350.org, and was also displayed at Schenectady’s city hall as part of Don Rittner’s Art Attack this spring.
Moon & River Cafe owner Richard Genest saw the painting at Starbucks, which prompted him to show MacFarland’s work (including “The Sorrow of Sophia”) throughout the month of August. A reception for MacFarland will be held at the cafe on Friday, Aug. 20, Schenectady’s Art Night.
The Sorrow of Sophia, by Elizabeth MacFarland
Q: How did your interest in painting develop?
A: As a child, I used to love to look at art, and I used to try to copy van Goghs, actually, and I think I would say that van Gogh is still my favorite artist. And I just would mess around with oil paints; I never had any training. I would also do quite a bit of drawing.
I started getting interested in doing something different when my boys left home. I guess it was the empty nest syndrome. And a friend told me about this wonderful teacher in Albany, Marta Jaremko is her name, and she’s got a place in Albany called the Artist Studio. And I went to her, and she’s an amazing teacher. I actually owe her a lot for teaching me how to see. You know, I can always go and take something that I think I’m seeing everything [in] and she’ll always find something, so she’s been wonderful.
Q: Do you remember your first painting?
A: The first painting that I actually completed was a still life. She would have these setups. I completed that on 9/11, 2001. I went in, it was a Tuesday morning, and I will never forget hearing about that on the radio, so I can kind of mark my first completed painting as happening on that day. I started out doing a lot of still lifes, that kind of thing, just to sort of train, get trained in how to work with paint, mix colors and all that kind of thing, and then started branching out more into my own subject matter after a few years. I don’t go regularly anymore, but I go occasionally for help on things, and she was actually pretty instrumental in helping me with the big five-panel painting [“The Sorrow of Sophia”].
Q: What was the initial inspiration behind “The Sorrow of Sophia?”
A: I just completed that last October. Actually, I started it in March of 2008. I got this idea — a couple things kind of came together. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the George Landis Arboretum out in Esperance, but there’s a 500-year-old oak tree out there. It’s just beautiful, with this amazing view. And it’s a really powerful place, because the tree — you know, you think about what the world was like 500 years ago, and that tree has been here since then. And some of the old gnarly branches would kind of reach down, and looked to me almost like an arm reaching down, almost protectively over the earth. So I thought, I really want to do something with this tree, the image, so we took photos and stuff.
Q: Who is Sophia, and how did that end up tying in with the initial image of the tree?
A: I came across a photograph of a statue in a cemetery in Genoa, Italy, of an angel that had this very sad expression, and the rain had created sort of these patterns of drips across the statue which looked almost like tears, and I started putting these images together. The tree was the metaphorical tree of life, and I chose two canvases because I needed the tree of life to be broken, metaphorically again, to symbolize — life right now on the planet I feel is a little bit of a precarious situation. The fact that we’re experiencing a lot of extinctions, global warming, all these kinds of things.
So I had this idea of making the panels on the left be pastoral, the panel on the right be industrial, and then above the spirit or the angel, which represents wisdom. Wisdom is a feminine personification in the Apocrypha in the Old Testament. So the idea was as it moved from the pastoral to the industrial, I wanted the angel to move from life into stone, kind of moving, showing that from life into possible life being threatened.
Q: How did everything tie together in the final painting?
A: I just started sketching it in, and it was a huge project. I thought I’d bitten off more than I could handle. But I kept working on it for about a year and a half, and I went to Marta with the three panels, and she said [that] it’s always good to put a human figure in there, because then you have a dialogue happening between, whether you believe literally in angels or God or whatever doesn’t matter, but it’s a dialogue between our own self and the transcendent or our best selves, whatever’s within us.
So it’s that dialogue, but then there’s the human element and the divine element. So some people probably look at the painting and think that the person in the painting is Sophia, but Sophia means wisdom, so Sophia is the angel. And then I decided I wanted it to have symmetry, so I carried over into another panel. And the metaphor of the road going off into the right, going off into the night, and the moon is waning. The tree is, the leaves are less full. It’s a dark painting, but it’s not without hope at the same time. And I feel that if we can use our wisdom and make good choices — I feel we’re at a kind of a crossroads in human history actually.
Q: You mentioned van Gogh earlier, but who are some of your other influences?
A: I love some of the American, Winslow Homer, Thomas Ekins. I love Thomas Ekins’ portraits, he’s in Philadelphia and when I lived in Philadelphia I used to go to the museum of art there and I was very impressed with him. This was before I was even painting. John Singer Sargent. I love Mary Cassatt, her paintings of children. Also Frida Kahlo; I saw her art … in Philadelphia and I was very moved by the stories she had to tell in her paintings; they definitely told stories. I would say those are probably some of my favorites. I’m sure there are others that I’m not thinking of.