Jonathan Farr
- Alumni, 2011
- Faculty
- Bespoke Courses Faculty
Biography
Jonathan graduated from the Slade in 1997 with a BA in sculpture and studied on the 2010/11 drawing year at the RDS.
Working from memory, observation and imagination, drawing forms the base of his wok which includes stop frame animation, painting, print making and illustration.
He has exhibited in UK, China, Spain and Mexico, his animations have been screened in festivals and exhibitions around the world and he has illustrated 20 children’s books published in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Spain and China.
Jonathan has 15 year’s experience teaching art to students of all ages and backgrounds.
He currently teaches drawing into animation online for the RDS.
On drawing
For me drawing can vary enormously in content and intention. I am fully absorbed both by a daydreaming doodle on the back of an envelope and drawing large scale outside in the street. Sometimes it demands focus and concentration, a settling down into the present moment. It becomes a kind of meditation where thoughts dissipate.
Drawing can also be a way in through the back door, accidental, almost unintentional, resulting in unexpected surprise. Drawing is a very direct attempt to empathize, inhabit and describe the sense of a thing to me, whether it be a person, an object, a place, an idea, a memory.
Drawing has served many purposes for me. Most often drawing has been purely for itself. But other times it has been to rough out illustrations for books, it has run with ideas as they grow in sequence, in comics or animations, and has been the search for a painting’s subject, the visualization of a vague image in my mind’s eye.
Drawing in animation is an addictive magical process. It has the power to unlock the imagination, to swim into a river of live images that tumble and run as fluid sequence.
