Ivan M Farmer

Artist Statement

I like to create work that has an over all feeling of a reality or view of a make believe world that is influenced by architecture, science, and industrialization. I am interested in how humanity changes nature to create societies, tools, habitats and the consequences of our actions in doing so. I am also influenced by our hopes and dreams of how we might create our future reality through the continued manipulation of nature.

Over all image of work usually represents man made environment with a touch of nature. Elements or forms in artwork are placed in such a way as to create flow/ eye movement, balance/ slightly unbalanced, energy/ relationship between marks, lines, photos, objects and textures.

To create this art, I take graphic images, printed words, figures, symbols- any of the countless human made elements floating around our society or world: piece of ticket stub, receipts, tags from clothes, wrappings, internal workings of machines or trash found in the street and use them for inspiration and then combine those found ideas with photos and symbols on paper to form a collage, mixed medium style. Media used in creation, range from but not limited to: stains, graphite pencil, acrylic paint, charcoal, ink, chalk.

Education

B.A, Art, with emphasis in Studio Arts, California State University, Long Beach.2001

A.A, Art, with emphasis in Painting and Drawing, Grossmont College, San Diego.1999

A.A, General Studies/Liberal Arts, Grossmont College, San Diego.1997

Biography

I was born and raised in San Diego California. Growing up in S.D. was great, plenty of open surf and sunny days. Around the age of twelve, I started taking art lessons on my mothers’ request. The lessons were taught by Mona Mills, an oil painter that taught some drawing but mainly just wanted to get the people in her classes painting as fast as possible. I studied with her off and on until High School where I took two years of art class with an emphasis in drawing and painting and two years of black and white darkroom photography. After high school, there was a number of years where the only art I was subjected to was that of my own making or at the art museums in town.

Around the age of twenty-two I moved away from San Diego for the first time to a ski resort called Mammoth Lakes. I lived there for five months and loved the people I met there from all over the US and world. The next snow season I thought about working at another ski resort and moved to Lake Tahoe but was unable to get a job I liked and came back after just a few months. Yet, while there, I hung out around their community college to do research in their library on tigers for a drawing I was working on. It was then, while walking down those cold snow covered streets, that I made up my mind to go to college to study art.

Once back in San Diego I enrolled in classes at a local community college. While there I studied: drawing, figure drawing, ceramics, bronze casting, metal work, black and white darkroom photography, painting, design, and art history. I loved the art classes and stayed there until I had almost taken them all. It was only then that I decided it was time to look into a four year college.

I had been spending some time up in San Francisco; therefore, went up that way to look into schools like San Francisco State, San Francisco Art Institute and San José State. I liked all those schools but I had a friend that was attending California State University Long Beach and she had told me how much she loved the art department there, so I went to take a look. I fell in love with Long Beach and after meeting the head of the art department, decided to enroll there.

I spent two and a half years taking as many different classes as I could at CSULB. For example, I took classes like: print making, jewelry making, sculpture, mixed media and many others. Also, while at CSULB I had the great opportunity to participate in many different and diverse art shows such as “Safe House” and “Ice Cream”. These shows inspired me to collaborate with a few artist friends (mainly photographer Dan Root and Metal Artist Conchi Sanford) to put on a large mixed media art show in San Diego California called the “Gathering of the Arts”. After two and a half year’s time at CSULB, I walked away with a degree but I had something much more important to me than that, a fresh idea of what art could be and mean. I learned this from some very incredible teachers and from being in so many different art shows with amazing artist.

After graduation, I left Long Beach and took off to spend a month in Europe where I continued to work on my ideas of art in my sketchbook. Although my head was full of art, on coming back to the states I set it aside for a year; just working on a few pieces here and there; and then one day I just started in on a series of large sized oil paintings dealing with texture and color but kept going back to look at some print work I had done in college and the work I had done in my sketch book while over in Europe. It was from that work I drew the inspiration for my current style of art.

After living in San Diego for a few years I left to live in San Francisco for a short time. While there I worked at refining my art ideas in the collage mixed medium style.

I currently live in San Diego California pursuing art full time; always trying to draw inspiration from the people, town, art and life around me.