Callum Farrell
“Painting has always been a place for me where I can throw absolutely everything at it…”
Interview by Sonja Teszler
In your paintings, especially the newer works, various familiar images, and recognizable motives seem to be flowing into one another and overlapping each other. What are your references, and do you arrive at them more through research or through instinct?
With my most recent work, I have been interested in how images or motives can in some way signal a time or event. For example, when commuting from Brighton to London for work I often saw passengers taking a photo of themselves holding a newspaper at a location or underneath a clock. I assume this was to prove they were at that location, at that time and day for expenses. But it made me think about what it is that makes each day unique and could also act in the same way as the newspaper. This is how I started becoming obsessed with sunrises and sunsets. They work similarly, unique to each day and there for a large number of people to see, so I began recording them through painting. They became the background to a lot of my recent work, a secret tribute to a mundane and uneventful day in the past.
I think the instinctual element of my work comes in the formal decisions made in the placement of imagery. They need to be instinctual and even random as this the way we consume a lot of the information that is constantly bombarded upon us. From this, the motives that are placed on top of and melding into each other, create a confusing time zone within each painting, where nothing is linear.
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I was born in London in 1994 but grew up in a small seaside port town on the outskirts of Brighton. It was a great place to grow up, positioned between the sea and the South Downs. I was encouraged by my parents from an early age, my Granddad was a photographer and my great grandparents were musicians, so I was surrounded by influence and lucky enough to have encouragement. I studied my foundation at Brighton and Hove City College and that’s when it really all changed for me. I was suddenly surrounded by a group of people with similar interests and ambitions, and was urged to create work in a completely different manner. It was extremely liberating and defining. I was then accepted to study Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, moved to London and had 3 amazing years to develop my practice and meet some incredible people. Since graduating I have moved back down to Brighton and back up to London where I have a studio in Camberwell.
Through the Ferns
Greek Dive
Third Floor Sunset
Could you talk about your experimentations with different surfaces and your process to achieve the layered effect in your works?
In older work, where my paintings were very layered, surface seemed more important. I have a tendency to make a painting, hate it and then make another painting on top. It got to the point where I was making about 10 or 20 different paintings on the same canvas and never really getting what I wanted out of it. So, initially out of anger I started to hack and cut back into the work which were now thick with paint, in an ‘all-over’ way. This created an abstracted version of all of those paintings into one. I enjoyed working in that way for a while but felt I had exhausted that process quite quickly. I started to struggle with the way my paintings were being read; they screamed process but it was never really about that and I wanted it to be more. I think part of why I would layer and layer was because of my own insecurities and expectations that I set with painting, nothing was ever good enough so I would just cover it. However with my most recent body of work I am allowing the figuration and style in which I paint to show through, instead of completely covering what was before I only partially obstruct it. Formally it’s a lot more liberating. Although both ways of working look changed and different from one another, the ideas and progression are very similar.
Your work engages with many different types of narratives and information, including popular culture, art, architecture, music, politics, and your own life. What drew you to painting and the flatness of painting specifically to convey all this, as opposed to more multidimensional media?
Painting has always felt so natural to me. There have been periods such as my first two years of University at Camberwell where I barely touched paint, working with film and installation. However was drawn back to painting, fulfilled by something that neither of these other mediums could do.
There is something so personal about painting that I didn’t really find in other mediums. However I would never limit myself to one mode of working and have been planning to make another film for some time, as I believe my current ideas would adjoin quite seamlessly in that medium. Painting has always been a place for me where I can throw absolutely everything at it and it can take it, and I can leave it there and forget about it. It will still frustrate and anger me on more occasions that not, but I like that what I put in to it, is not mine anymore, the work owns that now and that’s a relief.
Orange Gates
Your paintings seem to play a lot with materiality, reminiscent of scales or the bark of a tree - are you drawn to organic textures?
In my most recent work yes, organic texture is something I have tried to achieve. Living back in London, away from the sea and countryside, I have a bit of a yearning/nostalgia for nature and space. However I have always had an active interest in the interactions between natural and urban world, how they live together. How opposite or different entities coexist, and the conversations they have with one another. A lot of the textures I achieve in my new body of work are from the mass layering of these entities; they often lose their form and become abstracted. I think in my previous work the texture that was created at the ‘end’ of a work was the by-product to what had come before; the multitude of layered paintings. I never really set out to achieve those textures and whatever they reminded people of, wasn’t really the point. To me they only ever really symbolised the ability to, or lack of process many images at once, like putting 50 different items into a shredder and viewing a condensed version of them all.
How do you think painting differs from other mediums in presenting a narrative to the viewer?
I think that depends on the work. The narratives I choose to explore, I believe suit painting better than other mediums, but like I said before I wouldn’t limit myself to one. The more I think about it the more I think it doesn’t differ all too much to other mediums, its more out of habitual preference. But with painting I feel I have complete freedom to give my view of reality and I can change it whenever I see fit.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
I work as an art handler, and I was recently installing some very small Lee Lozano paintings that absolutely blew me away, can’t stop thinking about them to be honest. They are clever and funny but also dark and confusing, a combination of varying imagery in a nightmarish dreamscape where you can’t really put your finger on what is going on. They made me feel uneasy but in a good way, if that makes sense.
Above It
Beach Ready
Your practice appears to gravitate progressively towards more structure, as grid or window-like systems appear in the paintings as a quasi-desire to “impose” an order, a form of control onto the visual information on the canvas. Could you elaborate on this interest?
I have noticed that too. It’s something that happened over the years without me noticing really and I think previously it may have something to do with my desire to formally control the painting. However upon noticing it I began to use it. I’m very interested in how we view the world, what we look through to see it. More times than not you are looking at the world through a framing device, so many windows; car, train, TV, phone. The attention to a point is seen through a barrier, and that kind of freaks me out. It skews reality, as if we are not really breathing fresh air when experiencing something. Painting is another window, which further distorts the information of the work, as if you were in one of those fairground mirror mazes but each mirror showed you something different. The frames of these windows control the bedlam, stopping it from spilling out, infecting everything and they act in the same way in my painting, making it at least partially readable.
How do you go about naming your work?
We were talking earlier about my references and how important research and instinct is. Naming my works come from a culmination of the two, as after I’ve made a painting and I’m ‘finished’ with it I usually feel that one part of that work has an overriding presence from either a reference or instinct. For example Greek Dive shows two divers fairly clearly at the forefront, whereas Third Floor Sunset is less obvious. Of course I can name all of the references, but I like how the titles of the works can be used to either point to something unseen or confuse a viewer further. My works aren’t about linear narratives and when the painting may actually be showing something quite linear, a title can completely change that.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I have plans for a number of shows this year and to continue developing this new body of work.
Publish date: 11/02/2020
All Images are courtesy of the artist
