Back in the 1950s a group of painters in the San Francisco Bay Area established what came to be known as Bay Area Figurative Painting. Originally David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, painters who had all done abstract pictures, decided to embark on figuration which was indebted to abstract gesture painting, but looked again at the world of appearances for their subjects. They even painted from the life model which simply was not done by the Abstract Expressionists. A second generation, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, Bruce McGaw and others made this new approach to painting (or sculpting) the human figure, into their own and endowed it with a new spirit. Ursula O’Farrell can be said to represent a third generation which includes Christopher Brown and Roger Hermann.

O’Farrell has focused her painting almost entirely on the depiction of women, reflecting no doubt a concern about her own identity. These canvases are done by an artist who has absorbed the lessons of Action Painting and are done with a vigorous brush, probably also with a palette knife and a trowel with lush paint slathered on to the support. Some may seem unrestrained at first look, but they follow their own order—as a 17th Century Chinese landscape painter once said: “The brush is for saving the world from chaos.” Her women, lost in thought, seated, lying, waiting, praying, dancing are all self-absorbed. Above all, they are her reasons for painting.

• soft cover ISBN – 978-0-9819933-5-5
  published by Fine Arts Press
  text by Peter Selz, Mark Van Proyen, and Maureen Davidson
  format: soft cover only
  dimensions: 11″ x 11″
  104 page plus cover / 50 color plates
  publications year: 2011
  order number: FAP-123 S
• out of print