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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 Cap9itol 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. |
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