“[I] try and capture the passing of time – which has always been a preoccupation with me – and find a way to represent that through painting.” – Lucy Farley
Lucy Farley is interested in the pictorial deconstruction and rearrangement of landscape, the figure, and still life. She depicts places she has a personal connection with or a history that inspires her. Through painting, drawing, and printmaking, Farley’s work aims to build up a record of time, spirit of place, and the changing feelings that occur through travel. The fragments of memory, past sensations, and experiences associated with particular urban or natural landscapes collectively form the basis of her work.
Drawing lies at the heart of Farley’s practice. Used as a fundamental starting point, her drawings gracefully evolve as she takes an image and translates it into various different media, allowing a new abstract language to form.
Through repeated drawing and documentation, Farley presents her subject matter within a new context, exploring the spirit of place, object, and the human condition in relation to this. She is drawn to the tension and play between ‘real and illusory’. By working in situ and spending significant lengths of time in a given place, the artist allows images and shapes to become a part of a reference library of remembered forms. She often also draws onto printmaking plates, paper and drafting film, working directly from the landscape, figure, or set up in front of her.
Ever interested in the drawings of sculptors, the conversion of a three-dimensional image into a flat place, and the struggle to convey the full experience of a multi-dimensional world, Farley’s greatest influence comes from the work of the American Abstract Expressionists. She is inspired by the physicality in their approach to work and their ‘physical embodiment’ within the paintings themselves. Being Danish herself, Farley is inspired by Scandinavian painters such as Munch, Asger Jorn, and Per Kirkeby. She is drawn to the romanticism and love of landscape associated with Danish painters in the 1950s, as well as the melancholy and nostalgia embedded in the painting of English neo-romantics during post-war Britain, such as Keith Vaughan.