Bryan McFarlane took a major artistic risk in his last body of work, the Egg Series, jettisoning the content for which his work had been known for twenty years. 
A Jamaican by birth and an energetic traveller in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, McFarlane had become identified with work that invoked and reconstructed sacred spaces he has visited.  His paintings, exhibited internationally and at the Institute of Contemporary Art here in Boston, his home since the 1980s, glowed with light and evoked places of suffering and prayer, as if to summon before us the reality of sacredness in the world.

In the Egg Series, he stepped aside from his instinct for cultural anthropology.  Using fields of color and a hyper-simplified vocabulary of egg-shaped forms, he painted works with little specific and much general reference, essentially competing as an abstract painter.  The series was a success, winning recognition beyond his previous reputation.  Several from the series are being shown, though October 28, in New Possessions at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC.

Now, however, within the abstract space of the Egg Series, McFarlane's longstanding forms and concerns have reappeared.  But what was previously a deliberate evocation of particular places is now a free flowing outpouring like an unleashed id, of McFarlane's private storehouse of images.  Here one can recognize a candle, there an elemental stool form.  It's as if McFarlane has decided to work subconsciously, letting his images arrive in the compositions less from archetectonic plan than from their arising in him.