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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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