All I need is a room somewhere,
far away from the cold night air,
with one enormous chair
Oh wouldn’t it be loverly.
(From My Fair Lady, here.) Eliza Doolittle was not singing about a showroom sofa. She longed for the broken-in beauty of a used object, softened around its edges but still supple in its springs, exactly what Holly Ferrell paints and the reason for her success.
Farrell paints aging dainty things with good bone structures. They aren’t just tennis rackets, shoes and shelves of books, they are repositories of memory. If Bladerunner‘s Dr. Eldon Tyrell wanted the replicant Rachael to be a happy homemaker instead of siren secretary, he would have filled her head with Farell.
The child whose mother used these cookbooks ate well.
No new tennis balls in Farrell’s paintings.
What saves her work from other feel-good fantasies is the exactitude of her depiction, her spare grace. Next to hers, Thomas Kinkade‘s smeary landscapes are bloated frauds. There is also in Farell’s work an undertone of elegy. The shoes below date from the early 1950s. It’s not likely that their owner still wears them. They are what you’d find cleaning out your mother’s closet after her death. If your mother favored florals and wore high heels, these would pierce your heart.
Kincaide’s “paintings” stand on their own–as bloated frauds.