Kealey Farmer

Born and bred in Derbyshire and now settled in Silverstone in Northamptonshire, contemporary artist Kealey Farmer has fond memories of a childhood idled away with doodling and drawing, which in turn progressed to painting; with all pointers suggesting that she would follow an artistic path to some description. Farmer relocated more southerly to be with her future husband and has been drawing and painting for in excess of 25 years, yet for a large chunk of this time it was purely for pleasure and not commercial recognition and therein, personal gain. Indeed, Farmer only committed to art as a full-time vocation as of 2003 on account of her marketing career and raising of her own family taking up all of her time previous to this. That said, it was the birth of Farmer’s second child that gave her the push to close the door on her corporate career and instead focus on making art her living. Having hitherto concentrated on worked her way up the career ladder as a successful marketer to reach the heady heights of project management, Farmer was now set to go it alone and hopefully turn her pastime into a secure level of alternative income.

Predominantly a self-taught artist, Farmer’s early work was beholden on strong abstract pieces constructed on a large scale and incorporating determined swirls of vivacious colouration and lustrous energy, where the power play was derivative of acrylics and a sound foundation built on textures. Yet a few years into her second career coming, Farmer toyed with the concept of three-dimensional elements, and ran the rule over hand cut glass and Swarovski crystals as a means of piecing layers together and conveying a visual story, as the artist, emboldened and pictorially more confident, looked to expand her creative horizons still further. Farmer’s ‘Fusion’ collection, formulated and readied commercially in 2006/07 was the legacy of this period and was directly resultant of her close collaboration with local glass artist, Neil Witney, who literally would cut individual pieces to fit Farmer’s bespoke compositions.

After this brief creative sojourn away from her comfort zone, Farmer’s figurative studies beckoned her back to the 2-D fold from whence she originated, returning her to her personal A-Level studies. Prepossessing a more feminine form and latent appeal, Farmer talks of a sea-change in terms of direction at this juncture, and two pieces in particular come easily to mind that epitomise this transitional phase. ‘Living in the Light’ and ‘While you were Sleeping’ were both home to hundreds of Swarovski crystal elements, flowers and hearts, and presented a stripped back, un-plugged painting style for Farmer, a departure from what had gone before that facilitated simple flowers and crystals which were themselves finished off with a high gloss treatment that promoted a raised, reflective surface area which Farmer’s always wanted to recreate in some relevant aspect.

Whilst one idea in turn forced the ingenious and release of another, it was another brace of years before Farmer settled on an all-consuming design on which this projected vision would grace. The construct was piecemeal, with Farmer hinting that it was a laborious process, yet a perpetual, evolutionary one by the same token. When the leaves for the flowers were wrestled from Farmer’s conscious onto the canvas, this was shortly followed by the investiture of the trees, the trees in turn giving rise to the garden concept, which then implicated a gateway; and so on and so forth.

As her appreciation and comprehension of the new materials at her disposal grew, so did Farmer’s willingness to experiment further with scale, adapting her acrylic work to envisage increasingly-diametered abstract swirls. Farmer had a sixth sense that this newly fostered blend of design, colour and interior-inspired ideas would fire people’s imaginations. She wasn’t wrong, as her first exhibiting met with approval on all prescribed fronts and proved instantly successful, with her works selling out.

This acceptance inevitably led to Farmer further scrutinising her new directional flow, tweaking things here and there and the ushering in – and ultimate realising – of a gradual evolution. What came next was Farmer’s ‘Energy Collection’, which borrowed heavily from people’s dream-like images, captured from an emotional and higher state of conscious and tangibly based on the depth of feelings as opposed to what we can see. These fluid studies with neither a structured starting point nor pre-ordained endgame relied on colour theories rather than moods.

Farmer’s latest collections are discovered on a more compact scale and feature multi-coloured trees and floral injections, that enjoy more romantic notions and visually-suggestive twists and turns, and brandish hand-made hearts and various minute, feminine-orientated keepsakes. Farmer herself is best placed to summarise where she is now with regards to her art and her personal creative journey travelled; “Throughout my life I’ve always loved exquisite things so it’s been a natural process for me to incorporate this into my work. I love colour, reflections and fluid movements, I want people to be captivated by what they see and hope to make people feel good through my art”.