Sheep and Mirror
Signed and dated oil on board
From the Sheep Walks series.
Early in his career, for want of money and materials, Farrington took to painting on whatever scrap board and broken furniture he could find, and the habit never left him: bed boards, drywall panels – some still caked in patches of plaster – and shopfront fittings have all lent themselves to his work. Like icon painters working to the dimensions of a cabinet or an altarpiece, painting to arbitrary dimensions had a direct effect on Farrington’s pictorial organisation. The movement of figures and brushstrokes often swirls to a central focal point, the sides of the composition warping round it like a fish-eye lens. In this depiction of a convex roadside mirror, the effect is quite literal.
Signed and dated oil on board
From the Sheep Walks series.
Early in his career, for want of money and materials, Farrington took to painting on whatever scrap board and broken furniture he could find, and the habit never left him: bed boards, drywall panels – some still caked in patches of plaster – and shopfront fittings have all lent themselves to his work. Like icon painters working to the dimensions of a cabinet or an altarpiece, painting to arbitrary dimensions had a direct effect on Farrington’s pictorial organisation. The movement of figures and brushstrokes often swirls to a central focal point, the sides of the composition warping round it like a fish-eye lens. In this depiction of a convex roadside mirror, the effect is quite literal.
Description
Signed and dated oil on board
From the Sheep Walks series.
Early in his career, for want of money and materials, Farrington took to painting on whatever scrap board and broken furniture he could find, and the habit never left him: bed boards, drywall panels – some still caked in patches of plaster – and shopfront fittings have all lent themselves to his work. Like icon painters working to the dimensions of a cabinet or an altarpiece, painting to arbitrary dimensions had a direct effect on Farrington’s pictorial organisation. The movement of figures and brushstrokes often swirls to a central focal point, the sides of the composition warping round it like a fish-eye lens. In this depiction of a convex roadside mirror, the effect is quite literal.
