Tom Farthing
Tom Farthing’s Americana: Mother and Child is a familiar scene of a family treat to one of their favourite, albeit slightly over-priced diners. A blueberry waffles and chocolate sundae paradise in which they can temporarily celebrate their newly found consumerism and brush away their increasing conformity and uneasiness. Or at least it could be.
In an information-hungry age where any question can be googled and every answer found on Wikipedia, there are no such insights to be found about Farthing’s work. They simply don’t exist. Tom’s subjects are mainly complete strangers. He knows nothing about them (and nor do we). If you come to view Farthing’s work to find a familiar narrative, some rags to riches cliché or a more sophisticated version of agony aunt, you better be prepared to make and find it yourself.
What are you working on?
A series of paintings based on photographs of American families.
Americana: Mother and Child, 2014
Do you know them?
No – they have nothing to do with my life. They are people I don’t know in places that I’ve never been to. There’s a real distance there which makes them, in a way, more abstract.
0:03:58, 2013
Painting people you do know can actually be harder than painting people you don’t know.
I paint from photographs because I find the absence of the model interesting. With models, it can be difficult to paint. Someone’s physical presence can be distracting or emotionally demanding which can get in the way of the process of painting. So by painting people I don’t know, I get a certain distance from them.
Everyone says you should paint from your own experience. It can seem that I’m not doing that at all by painting strangers. But actually, you tend to start finding similarities between the people you know and the people in the photographs. So I find these paintings are like self-portraits of some ideal family, or my own family.
Americana: Girl in a Red Dress, 2014
The images that I am working from have a very specific weird quality – they are old 1950s photographs. So they give off the perception that life back then was better than it is now. They have an almost utopian sense about them. I like to have an ironic viewpoint on this and I don’t necessarily believe that life back then was better. But the essence created by using these old, unknown family photos is intriguing.
Many of your paintings have the human figure as their main subject matter. What do you find so interesting about the human figure?
It’s extremely abstract. It’s extremely complicated. It’s an endlessly varied structure. I got quite obsessed with working with it to be honest and had to pull away from it.
Getting Out, 2014
Model in Movement, 2013
You also have a series of nude paintings. Why did you focus on the nude in particular?
A figure without clothes on is not necessarily an erotic figure. My nude paintings are more about a primitive, primeval state – a pre-historical state. They are interesting because there are no men in those paintings. I was more interested in the relationships between the women than the relationships between men and women.
Model In Movement (The Conversation), 2013
For more work by Tom Farthing, please visit: http://tomfarthing.co.uk/
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