JOHN FARRINGTON BIOGRAFIA

During a visit to John Farrington’s studio in 2011 our filmmaker Alex captured a glimpse into the imagination and creative practices behind Farringtons work. His art explores the relationship between the human and animal kingdoms, and their connection to the environment.

As a young student John Farrington attended the School of Arts in Dudley. He was influenced by the work of Christopher Wood, Edward Bawden and John Minton, and a little later by the Kitchen Sink painters Jack Smith and Edward Middleditch. It was perhaps these two as from anyone that Farrington developed his penchant for dark tones and the sombre, drained, almost monochromatic palette evident in much of his earlier work.

Trained in illustration as he was, the severity and austerity of the abstract work which was becoming fashionable in this country at the time, held little attraction for him. What interested him more was the landscape he knew and loved, and the people, animals, birds and fish which inhabited it, and inhabited his imagination.

It was not merely the so-called neo-Romantics, nor only English painters who influenced him, but in his late teens and twenties he was attracted by the vigorous and free use of paint by the Expressionists, especially Oskar Kokoschka, with his energetic and aggressive allegorical paintings. From Kokoschka’s example, Farrington was encouraged to paint directly. This direct way of working gives his pictures their immediacy and his compositions the space filling element which is a characteristic arising not only from his way of painting, but also from his training as an illustrator, and his strong allegiance to the story-telling element in all his work.

As one who has worked on farms, he knows what is involved in the cruel side of animal keeping, and this worries him, as does the cruelty at times of the animals themselves. He has no time for the bestiality of factory farming.

For a long time, he enjoyed fishing, the comradeship of his friends at sea, the shared danger and the exhilaration, but when he saw a magnificent fish which had been caught, but was inedible, being savagely bludgeoned to death rather than thrown back alive, so that it could be held up and photographed as a trophy, then thrown back broken and lifeless, he felt that he could no longer, in conscience, be party to such cruelty, and he goes fishing no more.

As a young man he kept and bred cage birds and loved them because of their exquisite beauty. In retrospect he feels regret for what he did. However benevolent the jailer, the song birds were still caged and never experienced the freedom which was their right and due.

To a very large extent Farrington’s paintings stand on their own and speak for themselves. They have something of his own independence of spirit about them. They are not much like the paintings of others and are best seen and enjoyed for what they are, and as they are. They are the products of an imaginative and effusive painter who recognises the magic in ordinary things, and whose interpretations of this effloresce into life.

- Rigby Graham

John Farrington at the Goldmark Gallery essay taken from the exhibition catalogue, Goldmark Gallery 2010

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