William Farr
About
In his paintings, William Farr pursues a condition of prayer. Working at a large scale, his abstract fields of multiple colours and tone are rendered through a meditative and arduous process, seeking to produce an immersive experience.
Farr works with oil on linen, a surface that allows for great scale and detail. Pigment is applied with delicate mixtures of oils and mediums in the paint to produce an array of different depths and translucencies of colour. These methods create a particular rhythm of working: the materials when applied demand bouts of quick, instinctual painting, alternating with long periods of drying, providing time for reflection as each sitting deepens and progresses the work. What emerges from the aggregation are fields of colour that are both massive and delicate, shifting in changing light and rewarding patient looking. Both exuberantly bright and, with it bruised and bleeding quality.
This ‘cerebral mist’, as Farr calls it, gestures towards a realm of experience and mindful activity that exists behind intention, before thought and below the layer of consciousness. Though Farr connects his painting to personal experience of what he calls a ‘swirling colour in my mind’, he seeks to create in his paintings not an individual instruction but a space of universal access. Over long sessions in the studio, he tries to reach ‘an empty place in myself’, opening himself up as a conduit for instinct, emotion, and discipline.
William Farr b. 1992, Huddersfield, UK. He lives and works in London.
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