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-scènebecomes the action, the places and spaces are themselves animated, objects become events, and what is is what happens.

Mel Gooding, 1986