Stephen
MacFarlane

Stephen MacFarlane graduated from Grinnell College in 1982 with a degree in Biology. He came to art through drawing — sustained study at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle from 1985 to 1992, followed by printmaking at Pratt Fine Arts Center from 1995 to 1998. Monotype became his primary medium and has remained so. The monotype is the most direct form of printmaking: image applied once to a plate, transferred once to paper, the result unique and unrepeatable. A second pull from the same plate yields only a ghost — a faint, depleted impression that MacFarlane also uses, treating it as a generative rather than a failed event. His work on paper combines the immediacy of drawing with the physical unpredictability of the press.

In Rider 2023, the composition pivots on a terracotta ground that dominates three-quarters of the canvas, while cream and pale yellow build the figure's face and neck in bold, almost crude strokes edged with black contours. The paint sits flatly on the surface—no atmospheric blending—creating a stark frontal portrait where warm ochres and burnt siennas compress the head into a compressed, mask-like presence. MacFarlane risks an unfashionable directness here, rejecting subtlety for a kind of expressionist rawness that feels deliberately at odds with contemporary taste for nuance. His subjects are the ones he keeps returning to: figures, landscape, birds, and for over a decade the Duwamish River, Seattle’s heavily industrialized waterway that is also a Superfund site and a place of ongoing Indigenous significance. Since the residency’s founding he has participated in the Duwamish River Artist Residency — an annual eight-day plein air working group that has produced exhibition catalogues now held in the Seattle Art Museum Library and the University of Washington Special Collections. Working en plein air beside the river, alongside painters, photographers, and other printmakers, MacFarlane has developed a body of landscape and figure work rooted in a specific and contested place.

He teaches Elements of Drawing at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He is a member of Seattle Print Arts. He has held artist residencies at Gallery One in Ellensburg and the Contemporary Arts Center in North Adams, Massachusetts, where he worked alongside and assisted printmaker Brandon Graving. He was previously represented by the Roby King Gallery on Bainbridge Island and is now at JG Art Gallery, its successor at the same address.

Making monotype prints provides the best combination of the gestural aspects of drawing and the emotional presence of color and pattern for me. Quality of line — how it can go from thick to thin and back again, how it can carry different weights, how edges can merge or push against each other — are all excellently translated in this medium.