Andrea McFarland - Biography

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, I was living in Portland, Oregon when I began my career as an artist. For most of my adult life, I focused more on music than on visual arts, but in my late forties a wrist injury interfered with my ability to play my instrument. My creativity needed a new outlet, so I started drawing, and soon became obsessed. Drawing became the primary focus of my life. 

 I am mainly self-taught, having no formal art instruction other than one college class in drawing. But as the child of a painter and a photographer who towed me from one museum to the next, art was a consistent presence. My family also travelled and camped all over the West, so the outdoor world was always a big part of my life. In middle age I developed the patience to immerse myself in an image, and the confidence to return to the open mind, and the dirty hands, of the child who explored freely in redwood forests, open fields, and on mountain trails. 

 For the last twelve years, I have sold my pastel landscapes in galleries on both the east and west coasts, as well as in numerous art fairs and festivals. The natural world is my passion and my refuge. In my work I try to recreate a walker's perspective of landscapes as potential journeys that can draw us out of our usual tired circle of thoughts into a more spacious place. I hope to simply convey the inherently generous, fluid, and mysterious nature of the world that I see.

 I currently live in the Mendocino area, on the coast near Point Cabrillo Lighthouse.