ART VOICES SOUTH

JOHN FARNSWORTH

by Carol Donnell-Kotrozo

(Scottsdale, Arizona)

1982

John Farnsworth is a meticulous fine-line realist. His recent paintings are highly evocative of nature. Sloe-eyed cows and tawny horses with cascading manes are portraits of pure animal essence. You can feel the trampled hardness of the dry and dusty soil, overlain with pungent animals smells. Your eye flinches from the brilliance of the desert sun that bounces off slick, shiny coats and disappears into the crevices of corrugated flesh. Rotund masses and dimpling wrinkles of elastic hide mark the unfolding identity of the bovine and equine residents of the Southwest terrain.

John

Farnsworth

Red Bull, a 40" x 40" acrylic on canvas work by John Farnsworth

Despite the intense credibility of his paintings, Farnsworth rebels against the facile pigeon-holing of cowboy art or regional photo-realism. In fact, he shies away from any response to his art that dwells exclusively upon subject matter. "I reject the cold hard replication of photo-realism," says the artist, "but I’m not a drooling romantic like the cowboy artists either."

Farnsworth feels that people have too many preconceptions about animals, particularly their idealized notions of horses. Fortunately for the artist, cows eliminate this problem and lend themselves to wide-ranging symbolism. As a result, his art is seldom pure narration. He doesn’t take the anecdotal trail nor the beaten path of nostalgic longing for a lost historic past. His association with conventional Western art is tenuous at best, for his aims are more in line with modernist values.

In the catalogue to the 1981 Four Corners States Biennial Exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum, Farnsworth stated his ambivalence about subject matter and his desire to neither reject nor embrace it completely. "Sometimes my work is mainly about light, sometimes mainly about form, at other times color. Sometimes it is even mainly about cows or horses. 

Always, to some extent, it is about all these things, as well as design, textures, other art, myself, my Southwestern heritage, today, life, death, mystery, and everything else."

Farnsworth’s compositional elements are bandied about with freedom and originality: the close proximity of one animal to another, the repetitive overlapping and cropping of shapes and forms, the edge tension of juxtaposed surfaces, the tonal balance of white lights and deep velvety darks. He likes to play with impossible situations.

Farnsworth also condenses his space dramatically, excluding extraneous landscape features, and pulling the viewer in to close range. The patterned play of positive and negative space, the intensification of the sculptural volume of a form, the modeling with paint and color all contribute to the breakdown of literal imagery and to the foiling of mere illusion. Composing with a projector, he lays images on top of one another in superimposition so that he never duplicates a given photograph – or even the look of a photograph. Although cropping is used to control depth, he feels that it is a particularly prevalent way of seeing, characteristic of movies, TV photography, and even driving a car (the way the windows frame a view).

The viewer may luxuriate in the novel grouping of forms and in the way in which the artist poises one animal against another in tight clusters with bony heads interlocking one another. 

But, quickly, the desire to graft meanings onto forms converts structure into allegory. Soon, rippling linear networks of animal flesh become a topography of human experience. "Cattle, for example, can symbolize stoicism. They stand out in nature summer and winter with an enduring, tenacious dumbness."

People get involved with those animals. Where one person sees them as metaphors for cocktail parties, others see them as spiritual symbols, as sacred icons. Whereas a Westerner might view cattle with a certain romantic attachment, someone else might see them as merely a configuration of forms. Farnsworth doesn’t mind this diversity of response, or this plurality of interpretations, no doubt because they mesh, never collide. Painting, for him, is spiritual and expressive in the largest sense, a vehicle for human emotion and communication. It is a compelling act and a mode of self-revelation, never strictly raw realistic representation.

With a sense of social commitment, Farnsworth presents the public with opportunities to invest his imagery with a sense of communal value. His success in local exhibitions is testimony to the realization of his goals. He won the best of painting award in 12979 and the best of show award in 1980 at the Arizona State Capitol Fine Arts Show. He was admitted to the 19812 Biennial at the Phoenix Art Museum and is the first Arizona artist to have a major work become part of the ARCO collection. With his gift for wedding the visual and the formal, and for bridging the gap between the estranged world of art and illusion, John Farnsworth has become the prototype for a new Southwestern synthesis, rooted in regional experience and imagery, but profoundly universal.

Carol Donnell-Kotrozo is Associate Professor of Humanities, Arizona State University, and has been published in the British Journal of Aesthetics and the Journal of aesthetic Education, in addition to numerous U. S. art publications.

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