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...John Farnsworth was
born in Williams, Arizona and at the age of nine, when he saw
paintings on display in art galleries in Taos, he decided that he
was going to be a painter. He has had no formal training but after
doing all sorts of jobs, the last of which he said was grandly
titled Preparator at the Museum of Northern Arizona, he decided in
1967 that he was only a painter and that he should practice it
full-time. Like the Cowboy artist, Farnsworth says that subject
matter is "engraved in my nature." He must have a subject,
and when he lived among the Indians and loved them so much that he
wanted to be one, naturally he painted Indians. although the
paintings were well observed, he admits that his attitude was
terribly romantic, "like the movies."
But Farnsworth is a person of deep inner
intelligence. the subject dissatisfied him and he began painting
Kachina dolls. These were like abstract paintings and they too gave
way to what one can only call a discovery of the inner soul, the
subject matter which served as the perfect medium of expression of
all that he knew himself to be. PHAEDRUS is his latest work.
Farnsworth was reading Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance and somehow the book got mixed up with
the painting still in progress. Among a lot of things, Pirsig's book
is a penetrating comment on the notion of the interchangeability
between writer and hero. A unique einfulung on the part of
Farnsworth as reader resulted in a rare literary menage a quatre,
comprised of writer and hero, painter and model. In the manner of so
many great artists before him, Farnsworth is Phaedrus -- in
the painting, that is. they are joined by deep links; they are both
western animals and are as immutably transfixed within that unseen
landscape to which they belong as are rocks and hills and canyons.
PHAEDRUS is a creation which traces its lineage through history,
through the Dutch animal painters, especially Paulus Potter, clear
back to Egypt and to those dark caves at Altamira. John Berger notes
that cows were probably the first things ever painted by man and
PHAEDRUS is of that company.
Phaedrus is a holy animal who accepts his status
with philosophical calm, because behind him on his right is his
alter ego, the perfect foil to his studied calm and contentment, a
Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll. This is the artist's discovery after the
painting was well on the way, and one has no difficulty accepting
this psycho-literary reading of the painted images. In fact, it is
very easy to read all the various characters portrayed as different
facets of the artist's self. the appropriateness of this
anthropomorphism is all the more secure when we recall that this
bovine colloquium refers to Plato's Phaedrus, one of whose
topics is the immortality and, more importantly, the transmigration
of the soul. Meanwhile, for the dyed-in-the-wool formalists who
might question the treatment of the various subplots, the
centerpiece of the picture, that massive neck and dewlap of this
godly Phaedrus, its concentrated, monumental modeling, calls for
more than a second look. It also demands that it be not taken for
cowboy Art.
...upon close examination we discover that it is the
light which is really the subject under study. the artist fastens on
this and transfixes it firmly within the artistic consciousness,
resulting in a highly and uniquely sensitive rendering. Farnsworth
says of his painting that he was struggling for three months to make
a statement about "the not-so-white white of the White Bull.
...These statements came naturally, unforced from
the artists, and the paintings agree that this is no PR posturing.
we are face to face with the formal, artistic concerns of the
artist. |
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