Painter creates images you can’t see, such as frogs on bicycles

When full-time artist Damon Farmer isn’t traveling the country or the world creating large-scale sand sculptures or painting public murals, he’s at his home in rural Woodford County.

There, he lets his imagination spread out, taking fantastical flights of fancy and fun that he puts into acrylic paintings, many of which he works on for years.

“Where I live, way out in the country in Woodford County, the property has creeks and hills, and it’s a great place to do plein air painting,” Farmer says. “Just painting in nature is always enjoyable.”

Farmer was spending time in nature when he got the seminal idea for “Taking the Kids for a Spin,” one of the paintings featured in the exhibit “Hey, My Ride is Here,” on exhibit through the end of the month at Artists’ Attic. The painting features a frog riding a bicycle through the grass. A mason jar filled with tadpoles is strapped to the back.

“I imagined what it would be like to look down at the grass and see a frog looking up from a tricycle,” he says. “That just kept evolving into what it is now.”

The painting is typical of the visual humor that he aims to bring to his work.

“If I’m painting for myself, it tends to be something that has a bit of a twist to it,” he says. “I like bringing things into visual form that somebody can’t go out and photograph, that don’t exist otherwise.”

A cat in a spacesuit, a woman taking a fish for a walk on a rainy day, a tiny two-inch person riding a bee while outfitted in flight gear — these are a few of the colorfully rendered subjects in the exhibit.

“I’m always looking for those kinds of odd combinations of images that really just make me smile, that have a sense of humor or are fun to look at,” says Farmer, who says most of his work evolves over time from images or ideas that pop into his imagination.

“They don’t typically come to me sort of full blown,” he says of his subjects. “They evolve usually from some thought that I have or maybe some image that I see even in the clouds and rock patterns or something.”

“I have just a wide range of interests — planes and trains, anything mechanical, classic books, nature, dinosaurs, science fiction — all of these things are kind of percolating around, and sometimes they make an odd connection to each other, dinosaurs and motorcycles or something. I will get an image and just start sketching.”

Some of the exhibit’s paintings have been years in the making.

“I don’t consider a painting finished until it’s sold,” says Farmer, who has tinkered with many of the show’s paintings for years.

“A lot of them have been hanging on my walls here at home,” he says. “Some of them have been here for years, sort of semi-finished, or there’s been things I want to change.”

“I’ve hung them up maybe for several years to think about what come next,” he says. “The show was a great incentive to pull things off the wall and finish them.”

This story was originally published December 20, 2017 at 10:38 AM with the headline "Painter creates images you can’t see, such as frogs on bicycles."