Bird of Prey

Oil on canvas.

Farrington's vibrant palette – ‘pumped up’, as his friend the artist Rigby Graham described it – gave rural idylls an edge: greens curdling to white, oranges dissipating into twinging pinks. Like Chagall, he had a preference for filling back- and foreground space with animal forms: birds saturating the sky like Giottesque angels, waters choking with fish, sheep and pigs looming large and as proud as the hills and mountains in the landscape around them.