THE TAOS NEWS

Home At Last

John Farnsworth waited a long time to call Taos Home

By Lynzee Webb

John Farnsworth was nine years old when he first visited Taos, in 1950. His mother had been born here, and though her family moved to Arizona when she was young, her love of Taos was infectious.

He remembers drawing pictures of Taos Pueblo’s multi-storied buildings while riding in the back seat of the family Buick, all the way back to Flagstaff. It was on that trip that he realized he wanted to be an artist, and that he wanted to live in Taos.

Just over a year ago, Farnsworth and his wife, Thea Swengel, finally made Taos their home. In April, much to their surprise, they opened Farnsworth Gallery Taos, next to the Stables Art Center. When they moved to Taos, John and Thea certainly had no plans to open a gallery. But when the space became available they asked themselves, "Why not?"

It seemed to be a perfect place to exhibit Farnsworth’s work. "It’s an environment that makes people feel at home and relaxed," Swengel says. "It’s a space that allows John's work to communicate with viewers in an informal, personal, setting." Farnsworth’s acrylic and watercolor paintings fill four small rooms of the intimate gallery space, and are nicely offset by the Georgia O’Keeffe photographs of Dan Budnik and the ancient style, yet very contemporary pottery of Michael Kanteena and Lee Brotherton.

Farnsworth is a self-taught artist, or, as he says, "self-teaching." "I did enroll briefly in the Famous Artists’ Schools correspondence course," he explains, "but dropped out when I noticed the bold-type admonitions ‘You learn to draw by drawing’, and ‘You learn to paint by painting.’ I decided that was the best advice I could get, and I’ve been following it ever since."

In the late 1960’s, Farnsworth left his job as Preparator at the Museum of Northern Arizona to paint full time. For the next thirteen years or so, his work was centered almost exclusively on the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo people;  their material culture and their landscape.

Then in 1979, a friend commissioned him to paint a thoroughbred race horse. That led to a seven year series of paintings of horses and cattle. The paintings that resulted are prime examples of the strength Farnsworth finds, and is able to capture, in his subjects.

Kachina dolls are another of Farnsworth’s favorite subjects. He has studied and painted them for the last thirty years. His models usually come from important collections such as the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Southwest Museum in Pasadena, and the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe.

By zooming in on their faces, and painting them larger than life, he both heightens their inherent abstract qualities, and enhances the feeling that the viewer is actually in the presence of the life force they represent.

In fact, most of Farnsworth’s compositions feature tightly-cropped subjects. This he says is partly because of his love of the movies, as well as his desire to distill things down to their essence; to remove everything extraneous.

Because he is self-taught, this and other aspects of his painting style have simply evolved over the years.

"I have a number of styles I work in because I have studied all periods and styles," he says.

Farnsworth Gallery Taos features his Kachinas, cattle, horses, figures, still lifes, dogs, landscapes, trains and "just about anything else that gets in front of me and catches my attention," he adds.

"I don’t have any limits on my subject matter," Farnsworth says, "so no one has ever been able to pigeon-hole me, and I like that."

"John is something of a maverick," Swengel says with a grin. " He doesn’t really like to talk about the subjects of his paintings because he feels the painting itself should be the subject. He doesn’t want to be categorized. He wants simply to be known as John Farnsworth, a good painter."

Once, someone referred to him as a Western artist, a description which still makes him bristle. "They could at least have said western Artist. I don’t paint strictly western subjects. They just happen to get in front of me more often because I live here. But I’ve painted from Alaska to Mexico, and from California to Italy. I never know what I’m going to paint from one day to the next. I am never bored. Every day is a new day," he continues, in a manner that makes it clear that he doesn’t want to be considered an artist representing any one genre.

"But," Farnsworth adds, "if someone wants to call me a Taos Artist, now, that feels pretty good."

ART YOU CAN LIVE WITH

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