Bill Farmer's Macbeth A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

Is this a dagger, which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling, as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.

Thus speaks Shakespeare's Macbeth, in the roiling, turmoiled voice of a regicide, on his way to murder his king. Can a visual artist translate this voice, this vision, into visual terms, this mind pursued by phantasms, crude fantasies of power unraveling into madness?

Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom has commented that of all of Shakespeare's heroes, Macbeth is the most "unfree"--driven to madness and murder by forces out of his control. his idea is made manifest by Farmer in this psychological portrait of Mac wraps Macbeth's head in dark spirals--like a mummy, or a hospital patient with a severe head injury. Like powerful iron bars, these black bands imprison his two coal black eyes, peering out at us with an unnerving gaze which combines fear, powerlessness and madness. It's as if these eyes are descending inexorably into a tornatic vortex of uncontrollable forces and will soon be engulfed.

In addition to the psychological portrait, this powerful image captures the existential dilemma, the sickness of the soul. The soul sick eyes are drowning, and their desperation is jarring to witness. But Farmers art further extends the complexity of this image. We glimpse Macbeth's moral blindness by the suggestion of vacancies in his eyes. This combination of expressionistic power and psychological subtlety is the work of one of Nebraska's most gifted artists. Bill Farmer died several years ago, and was an important presence in the Omaha art scene.