Curwen Gallery 1986

Energy is eternal delight

William Blake : The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

In the work of Julia Farrer the world is pictured as marvellous process. Each image catches in an instant of balance – or of tension – the dynamic multiplicity of variable elements that constitutes the reality of any moment. Space, time, movement, light and sound: the relations between each of these elements are of continuous change, of movement towards and away from each other, whilst (paradoxically) at any moment they exist in a state of harmony and integrity with all the others. Every moment is a moment of completion and a moment of infinite potential: Farrer’s paintings register the apprehension of this dynamic contrariety at the heart of things, the joy of her passionate encounter with what Lawrence called  ‘ the circumambient universe’.  In this it may be said to perfectly conform to the first – and most influential – of the so-called  ‘Six Canons’ enunciated by the theoretician Hsieh Ho which stand at the fountain-head of the Chinese theory of art, which called for painting to have dynamic movement that inheres in things and capture the very atmosphere that surrounds them.

This distillation of reality, this abstraction of the energetic spirit of things – of the rhythm and rhyme of nature – is achieved by the most rigorous of preparations; the visionary moment is arrived at by a process that is akin to the composition of the ascetic of the conditions of ecstacy, and by a similar suppression of expressive personality. She quotes Mark Tobey: ‘anonymity is a state of mind I very much respect’. (Of course, her paintings could be by no-one else.) The beautiful clarity of her work is born out of complexities and contingencies; it begins with an idea and ends with an epiphany. The idea is always specific and concrete – a place, a room, a glade in a wood at a moment of Spring, a theatre, a circus, a games- board, an incident. For Farrer truth is to be found in particularities, the moving principle of the whole in the articulation of the part. By a sort of magical transformation the mis-en-scène becomes the action, the places and spaces are themselves animated, objects become events, and what is is what happens.

Mel Gooding, 1986

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Towers and Bridges

Just before visiting Julia Farrer to see her latest paintings, I looked again at a drawing of hers that I have known for many years. Dispersed across it are a multitude of precise geometrical forms: slender bars, square-shaped planes, confetti-like fragments.  They have been set adrift at a variety of angles, but, apart from an accent of colour here or there to suggest solidity, they are entirely insubstantial. Space tends to flow through them, not round them.

That drawing was made in 1986 – these new works are rather different. ‘Back then, I was painting the atmosphere, the air,’ says Farrer, ‘but now they are more like architecture, something that can be constructed’. The titles – ‘towers’, ‘bridges’ – bear this out, though these paintings are hardly blueprints for construction. What they allude to are the Deconstructionist designs of such architects as Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman, with their abruptly-angled walls, their folded planes, their cuts and disrupted grids. It is an architecture that has largely remained on paper, where it is often seductive; when built, it is as often problematic. Ask the curators and those charged with the maintenance of Eisenman’s Wexner Center in Ohio.

But Farrer does not need to think about the functional consequences of her chosen forms. They can be stretched, warped, twisted and layered as she wishes – and in retrospect, their emergence from the drifting chaos of that 1986 drawing can seem like a logical development.

Mid-way in the process, as Farrer embraced colour, the planes started to become more substantial: arrayed sometimes overlapping, in a shallow space, they were taut, translucent membranes. Now you feel that they want to become truly three-dimensional, not just illusorily so. Already projecting at times beyond the orthodox rectangle, they flex back and forward in their narrow confines as if longing to emerge into relief.

The structure of these new works gives them a special resonance, as each configuration of forms is echoed in a more muted palette – a trace or a memory or a ghost. The repetition is complete in the vertical twinned ‘towers’, partial in the horizontal ‘bridges’. It conjures up a series of dualities: presence and absence, substance and shadow, day and night, while Farrer’s preferred blue-violet prolongs the nocturnal note. Introducing a steady beat, a system of measurement and order, into each of these paintings are straight lines at regular intervals, which overlay or penetrate forms (sometimes obscured by them). In the ‘bridges’ these lines extend across the surface like a stave; and such musical analogies could be pursued  for instance, the larger, coloured portion of each panel might be the full statement of a theme, the remainder its spectral reprise. Farrer brings Schönberg, Boulez, Kurtag into our conversation; a musicologist could certainly illuminate these paintings.

It is likely that this show presages a new turn for Farrer: the implied relief may   soon become actual. ‘I like making things – that will solve in the making’, she says. But these present works are beautifully balanced. Formally, spatially, they intrigue you and sustain your attention – but there is more. With those dualities they crystallise, the undertow of darkness, a dimming of the light, they are surprisingly profound. 

 Andrew Mead  2002

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Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition

Julia Farrer, Bridge

Julia Farrer’s large, strong but delicate painting eloquently demonstrates how far this competition has travelled since its beginnings 20 years ago. Then, it would have been difficult to imagine any abstract composition being selected for the exhibition, let alone winning a prize. And the ideas about traditional watercolour painting used to influence the judging, too. Now, few eyebrows are raised at the use of Chinese white or even of acrylics. Nobody will be scandalised by Farrer’s success, either. At least one abstract among the prizewinners is now a regular occurrence. This was the first time she had submitted work, too, so she was doubly surprised by the result.

Before the competition, I knew of Farrer as a printmaker and maker of artists books rather than as a painter. Given her distinguished career, my ignorance is inexcusable. “I’ve always painted,” she told me. “In fact, I first showed a painting in the Hayward Annual in 1978.” After studying at the Slade, she has exhibited widely, not only in London, where she lives, but on the Continent and in North America. She’s been a Harkness Fellow at the University of New Mexico and in New York, and her work can be found in many important collections, including those of the Arts Council, the Yale Center for British Art and the Tate.

Farrer’s prints, in a variety of techniques and always abstract, are distinguished by restrained but great visual beauty and technical accomplishment. So are her books, in which the complexity of a geometric composition evolves from one page to the next. All her works, whether prints, books or paintings, are of a piece, linked by a common interest in geometric form. “The books and prints go together with the paintings,” she says. “My paintings have become more constructed, more object-like.”

Her paintings retain the outstanding qualities of her prints, especially in the attention she pays to pristine surfaces and immaculate edges. All of these compositions, including our prizewinner, exploit the ambiguities that result from representing a three-dimensional figure on a flat surface. The result, as you can see, is reminiscent of an architectural drawing, an impression, which, as the title Bridge suggests, Farrer clearly wants to create.

It wasn’t just the ambiguous representation of space and volume that attracted the judges. It was also the unassertive but exquisite colour and, perhaps above all, the obvious mastery of the medium, demonstrated especially in the contrast  between the transparent and opaque areas, heightened by two contrsting forms. This is surely a worthy prizewinner for the 20th-anniversary year of the competition.

Frank Whitford,  Sunday Times Cuture Supplement,  August 26, 2007