It’s Halloween everyday and outsiders rule the streets in hypersaturated paintings by Denver suburbanite Lydia Andrew Farrell.
A visit to Lydia Andrew Farrell’s studio is a trip through the trappings of 1970s suburbia, into a neighborhood of wide, curving streets and culs-de-sac, past two-story tract houses with two-car garages and concrete driveways big enough to double as basketball courts. The artist, who uses they/them pronouns, greets me at the entrance of a modest brick structure with a front lawn planted with deciduous shrubs and grown-up ponderosa pines. This is where their parents live, in Centennial, Colorado, and the place where Farrell, now thirty-four, grew up and returns every day to paint.
I am led directly down a set of carpeted stairs to the basement rec room, crammed with icons of bedroom community living: a pool table, a small bar decorated with sports pennants, a pair of overstuffed recliners facing a television. Farrell’s studio is located behind all that, in an unfinished room with no natural light or ventilation. There is a furnace, a metal box that holds the lawn sprinkler controls, and exposed puffy, pink insulation stapled to the walls.
Farrell uses oil paint applied to canvas to blow up the suburbs and install a new chain of command.
Details are important to understanding Farrell’s world, to comprehending just how deep their immersion is into this style of existence that emerged in the last decades of the 20th century and continues to define domestic order in this part of the country. It is nuclear-family normal, garden variety, run-of-the-mill. Those clichés help to explain just how radical the artist’s take on their surrounding scenery truly is.
Farrell uses oil paint applied to canvas to blow up the suburbs and install a new chain of command. Farrell sends it all straight to hell, or at least to a place where the forces associated with darkness—witches in pointy hats, horned devils, winged ghosts—rule the streets. In Farrell’s scenes, every day is Halloween.
The artist makes painting after painting of split-level dwellings decked out in severed heads and spiderwebs. Spooky creatures peer out through picture windows. Public parks are populated with goblins. Every residence is transformed into a haunted house, a coven, a secret port for UFOs. Chaos, the enemy of planned communities, is the theme. “What people try to do here is make this pristine, picturesque kind of life, this family-oriented landscape,” Farrell says. “This is my subversion of the suburbs.”
That begs the question: is all this real, or is it a costume drama? Is Farrell decorating for the holidays or imagining a whole new world? It is a bit of both. “Halloween is the one time of year when the suburbs are more fluid,” Farrell says. By making every day October 31, Farrell imagines a future where outsiders are forever in. This vision, Farrell said, is the culmination of many things, and it came into focus when they returned to Centennial a few years ago, after undergraduate study at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, then grad school at Boston University.
College taught Farrell the finer points of classical painting—they know how to make a pretty picture—but they emerged from there as a self-described abstract expressionist, making messy paintings with bold brushstrokes, as they put it. Farrell’s paintings are more representational now, easier to read, though you still can see the influence of that particular style. The compositions are carefully mapped out, but there is a reckless look to each mark on the canvas, as if every swipe of paint was delivered with some raw and dramatic gesture.
This is Diebenkorn on LSD, or in a very bad mood.
Back in school, Farrell was a fan of Richard Diebenkorn and his oversaturated domestic landscapes. That influence remains in the recent work, and there is a bit of Diebenkorn’s contemporary, David Hockney, in Farrell’s obsession with neat, manicured neighborhoods. But this is Diebenkorn on LSD, or in a very bad mood. “I still like ugly, messy paintings,” Farrell says. “And I like figures that are simplified and kind of cartoonish.”
There are influences of horror films in the work, as well. The artist is a big fan of gore and visual excess. Farrell piles bright color on top of bright color—mixing oranges, golds, pinks, and browns in the same scene. “It makes me think of Dario Argento’s Suspiria where whole rooms are just filled with pink,” Farrell says. “It feels like a garish Disney movie.” But there are also experiences closer to home that manifest in the current body of work.
Farrell talks openly about past drug abuse, and the fact that they are substance-free now, and participating in a program that takes “a non-theistic, Satanic approach to recovery.” That is not about venerating Satan as a deity, but rather honoring the idea that recovery does not have to be based on Christian principles and there are non-religious, and anti-establishment, forces that can inspire people to alter their behaviors.
That said, there are more than a few devils lurking in Farrell’s current work. Farrell has also recently come out as non-binary. That change happened during recovery. For most of their life, people knew them as Mark, a run-of-the mill guy who grew up in a garden-variety suburb and went off to college. “I found out that I felt this way after doing all the meetings I was doing. A lot of trans people showed up to that. And the way they talked about it, I identified with.”
Now, Farrell is more of a long-hair, cute-black-dress kind of human. That transformation has not impacted the work but it has changed the way they view it. Farrell, for example, sometimes painted the popular, animated cartoon figure Daria—herself a suburban misfit—into their work and never understood the compulsion. Now, they think they simply connected with the character’s gender and painted it in as a sort of self-portrait.
It was not a simple incursion on the suburbs… it was a full-blown revolution.
All of those changes—in inspiration, geography, wardrobe—have resulted in a fresh confidence, a freedom to let the nonconformist ideas in their head spill out. Individually, the paintings come off like a guerrilla war waged house-by-house against the status quo. Together, they add up to something much larger. That became clear during a recent solo exhibition of more than twenty Farrell paintings organized by curator Jeff Page at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design in Denver.
Positioned next to each other on the gallery walls, the portraits of singular residences, parks, and public spaces came together to form an entire reimagined neighborhood. It was not a simple incursion on the suburbs staged by a lone outsider, it was a full-blown revolution intent on taking them over.
