blog TO: Art Agenda - July 2010

Even Closer: Holly Farrell from June 9 - Jul 4, 2010

At Katharine Mulherin, Holly Farrell is showing her paintings of Barbie and Ken. Paintings of Barbie are actually a virtual genre unto themselves and have been common for decades. Farrell's are distinctive for their elegance and disarming serenity. It's almost like a Zen take on art nouveau portraiture. However, her paintings of Ken are far more impressive for the utterly unnerving degree of anxiety she imbues them with. While Barbie plays dress-up with ease, his shifts from one outfit to the next have a nearly schizoid quality.

It's a fascinating and intimate show which manages to raise all sorts of disturbing implications about the nature of viewership and empathy, as well as more art worldly type topics like: what constitutes a still life and what is a portrait? Can you even paint a portrait of a doll? If a portrait is meant to convey some hint or peek into a subject's inner world through their stance and gaze, what does a mass produced object relate? Of course, it's not as though Ken can feel anything, or does he?

Boston Herald, December 2009

Chase Gallery is featuring Holly Farrell this December, and I have to say, she’s one of my favorites. Using acrylics and oil on masonite, Farrell paints still-life’s out of everyday objects and makes them interesting, but make no mistake these are not your grandmothers still-life paintings.

In the above painting, ‘Barbie Ski Queen and Ken Ski Champion’, she captures the duo in style and with a whimsical snowflake pattern background that lends itself perfectly to the Barbi phenom era.

‘Sofa’ is a fantastic piece of composition and color. The empty wall space above the couch leaves room for the imagination and provides a nice juxtaposition to the heavily patterned couch. The patterned floor adds just enough weight to the bottom of the painting, without taking away from the simplicity of it.

Holly Farrell is a self-taught painter who didn’t start painting till she was 29. She sold her first painting at 31. She is now a full-time artist and is represented by 6 different galleries. If you get a chance, head out to the Chase gallery this month and see in person what all the buzz is about. You won’t be disappointed.

ART IN AMERICA MAR 'O9



BOSTON
HOLLY FARRELL
CHASE

Born in North Bay, Ontario, and currently based in Toronto, Holly Farrell has exhibited her realist paintings across Canada and in a variety of venues in the States. In her first show at Chase, the self-taught artist presented 22 small acrylic and oil-on-Masonite still lifes and interiors (all 2007 or 2008).

Over the years Farrell has displayed an eye for the vintage, painting, among other objects, classic toy cars ("Dinky Toys") and a vacuum cleaner right out of a '50s appliance catalogue. This penchant for the old-fashioned continues unabated. Among the standouts in the Chase exhibition were depictions of five fashionable women's hats from an earlier era. In these vertical pieces (each measures 15 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches), the precisely rendered hats, with their pins, bows and veils, perch on stands and are set off by a background of decorative wallpaper.

The show also featured a multipanelled painting of 12 different juice cups, each panel measuring 8 by 7 inches and all arranged on the wall in a grid. These are the kinds of items that show up in yard sales - the last of a set won at a carnival, perhaps, or acquired with a fill-up at an old Sunoco station. Farrell meticulously reproduces their simple patterns and motifs - stripes, daffodils, a kerosene lamp - and conveys their humble presence. Each casts a small shadow on a white wall.

Since she began showing in 1995, Farrell has also depicted a range of bare-bones interiors furnished minimally a folded-up cot, an unassuming kitchen ensemble. In Armchair (14 by 18 inches), a well-padded, dull-hued chair is a stocky and squat presence in a spare space with an off-white wall and wide board flooring.

Whether she is intentionally nostalgic or not, Farrell plays on sentiment in her choice of subjects. Twin portraits of period Ken and Barbie dolls - he in football gear, she in a cheerleader outfit - evoke a kind of "Twilight Zone" eeriness: lifeless playthings that look as though they might start speaking. Whether a bowl or an arrangement of well-used children's books, whatever Farrell paints takes on a patina of history, personal and cultural. Yet you can read just so much into these paintings before backing off to simply admire the thoughtfulness with which each item is represented.

--- Carl Little

Oh wouldn't it be lovely. (From "My Fair Lady")

Eliza Doolittle was not singing about a showroom sofa. She longed for the broken-in beauty of a used object, softened around its edges but still supple in its springs, exactly what Holly Farrell paints and the reason for her success.
Farrell paints dainty things with good bone structures. They aren't just tennis rackets, shoes and shelves of books, they are repositories of memory. If Bladerunner's Dr. Eldon Tyrell wanted the replicant Rachael to be a happy homemaker instead of siren secretary, he would have filled her head with Farrell.


The child whose mother used these cookbooks ate well......No new tennis balls in Farrell's paintings.

What saves her work from other feel-good fantasies is the exactitude of her depiction, her spare grace. Next to hers, Thomas Kinkade's smeary landscapes are bloated frauds. There is also in Farrell's work an undertone of elegy. The shoes below date from the early 1950s. It's not likely that their owner still wears them. They are what you'd find cleaning out your mother's closet after her death.


If your mother favored florals and wore
high heels, they pierce your heart.

NOW Magazine FEBRUARY 2008

Still lifes that move you

We've never been fans of still-life painting. OK, some of Cezanne's still lifes were exquisite, but for the most part a bowl of fruit, no matter how beautifully rendered, is still just a bowl of fruit. But then we saw Toronto artist HOLLY FARRELL's elegantly simple portraits of antique kitchen chairs, old water pitchers and other worn tools of domesticity, and we decided to give the tired old genre another chance. Farrell's paintings reflect her deep understanding of how certain inanimate objects - when portrayed in the right light and setting - can be utterly haunting and soulful. As long as this self-taught painter continues to work, we say long live still life.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2003

Still life with meditation
Holly Farrell's simple images have depth. Painting and aloneness coexist in work.
By PETER GODARD

In the archeology of emptying an uninhabited old house, the big grown-up type things are dealt with first. Then comes the smaller stuff. You start at the point where your parents have died. But as the process evolves, you go back in time to the point when you first entered the picture.

This is pretty much the trip any small Holly Farrell still-life takes you on. It's not about childhood, although "Childhood - New Paintings" is the title and toys are among the painter's favourite images. In fact, the show at her Dundas Street W studio includes some 30 small paintings of Dinky Toys, each well handled and well loved. Earlier work includes portraits of fuzzie bunnies, well-used china dolls and toy bikes. Yet her work deals with an understanding of that distant solitude of childhood. With Farrell, the idea of solitude has more to do with the painting than the painter, although she's not always been understood this way. Yet ongoing critical reaction to Farrell - who turns 42 Saturday - almost always includes some reference to melancholy. One writer went so far as to suggest that "Proust would have loved" her work.

But for Farrell, growing up as one of seven kids, getting away on her own from the diner her family ran on Hwy 11 in Trout Creek, near North Bay, were often times of peace. Clearly she liked to play. Look at her paintings of the little red dump truck or teddy bear and you can sense they were once considered to be pretty perky items in their day. For Farrell, who has a husband, five cats and a busy studio, aloneness and being alone are miles a part. In a recent episode about her on Bravo!'s The Artist Life series, she admitted that she feels most centred when she's focused on her painting, "Maybe that's why I loved solitude," she said.

Because she's largely self-taught, it's perhaps easy to lump her in with the rest of the naif artists, although thinking along this line would force you to include Italian painter Giorgio Morandi in this axis of the wilfully simple. Farrell's no Morandi, at least not yet. Yet her works share with his sense of discovery, as if you've never seen what you're seeing as quite as memorable as they now seem. It's as if the artist's added something unseen to their mass. Gravity's pull on them feels much greater than it should be.

Like Morandi's, Farrell's work denies any critical attempt to mine them for symbolic content. If they're about childhood, it's a remarkably private childhood, no analysts allowed. Same too, with the objects she uses - or the objects she comes upon. Her paintings act as spies, seemingly catching their subject unprepared. Yet the toys, placed so neatly against a wall, do seem prepared for something. There's an aspect of performance to them, even if it is just the act of aging as we watch. The well-defined outline easily controls the interior spread of muted colour. They appear in sharp relief against their backgrounds.

Yet for all this, she maintains she's less a part of the tradition of still-life painters and closer to portrait-makers, "perhaps because of my approach to composition," she writes in an email. "All the time I try to keep the focus on the subject ... It was very soon after I'd completed the first few paintings that I realized I was working toward more than a study - they resonated for me in a way that's hard to describe. It would be easy to say they made me feel nostalgic (a bit of nostalgia is good medicine for everyone!), that the subject took me back to a place or a time or reminded me of someone - because it is that, but it's something else. I love (Mark) Rothko's work, and the impact his simple two-colour canvasses have when you first see them. But then that initial impression evolves or settles into a more long term meditative calm, so you can stare at one forever and not feel like you're wasting your time. I would love to have my work resonate in a similar way."

The Globe And Mail   Friday, July 7, 2000
By Leah Hendry
Art al Fresco: Up Close And Personal (excerpt)
Holly Farrell does James Whistler at her Toronto studio Holly Farrell might still be painting houses if not for the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. "Art is the one place I have found in my life that I feel comfortable," Farrell said. The exhibition is a highly desirable show for artists, not only for the exposure - about 100,000 people pass through Nathan Phillips Square at Toronto City Hall over three days - but also as a way for artists to break into the market. Farrell's foray into the art world happened eight years ago when a friend suggested that she submit some slides to the show. Much to her surprise, she was accepted into the Folk Art category. "The show was responsible for me being able to make a career out of my art," said Farrell, who lives and paints in Toronto. "It's great for artists who are just starting out; who don't have access to galleries." She now has a loyal clientele, some of whom have grown with her through her transitions and followed her various gallery showings. "There are people who normally shop in the Yorkville galleries and there are also kids out of high school looking for art - the range is so broad," Farrell said. She continues to show her work at the exhibition and also stages an annual studio show.

 Summer 1999
Lola magazine

By George Van Bussel

"Compact, realistic paintings of worn household objects on the verge of discard infuse the mundane items of our world with both a reassuring and disturbing sense of the familiar ... to look at something handled countless of times before like it's something completely inscrutable. The show breathes a new sense of purpose into that old genre we've almost forgotten: the interior Still-Life."

May 1998 - "Sharp Dresser"By Karen von Hahn.

Proust would have loved painter Holly Farrell. Her moody, often melancholy depictions of commonplace objects, like a rollawaycot, metal lawn chair or china teacup, are the Canuck equivalent of his reverie-inducing madeleine. Farrell, an artist from Burks Falls who has gathered a strong local following, started painting familiar objects like furniture to teach herself how to draw. "When they started to take on a character of their own," says Farrell, "I realized I was really painting portraits without any people in them."