COTY FARQUHAR
Creative Director | Designer | Curator of the Trent Nathan Book & Retrospective
PORTRAITS for Trent Nathan Art Gallery | Now
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This is Trent Nathan’s art world, as I imagine it now.
These contemporary portraits bring together art, photography, fashion, memory and imagination, drawing upon the extraordinary creative life and very real world of Trent Nathan AM.
While working with Trent on his book and exploring his extraordinary archives over the last twelve months, I have found myself transported into a lifetime of original paintings and artworks, fashion photography, interiors, studios, objects and the many details that have surrounded his creative life.
Over the past seven years, I have photographed & filmed Trent, his home, his studio and many of the things that make up his world, bringing these elements together to create a new series of unique works.
Into these portraits, (there are 100 in this series) I introduce imagined people, moments and scenes, sometimes inspired by the characters, stories and memories Trent shares with me from his past, using my own photography, digital artistry, graphic design and, now, the remarkable creative possibilities of artificial intelligence as part of my process. I am literally creating the scenes for a movie and a live retrospective... it is my way as a visual artist and editor to tell my stories.
Some things you see in these portraits are real. Some are imagined. And sometimes the two become almost impossible to separate. For me, that is where the magic lies.
After more than four decades working as a photographer, elite stylist, designer, decorator, editor and visual storyteller, and the owner of Farquhars Furniture, Makers & Restorers of Fine Furniture, seeing everyday life in atelier and traditional furniture workshop. I have always created by bringing elements that catch my eye all together, flowers, fashion, interiors, furniture, objects, people, places and the gardens of my home in the Southern Highlands, and transforming them into something new. It is a way of working that has flowed through my editorial career and, particularly, the stories I have created for Styling Magazine Australia, a digital magazine I launched 15 years ago.
The tools may continue to change, but the creative instinct remains the same as it was when I first walked out through the doors of Art School into my full time position at Vogue Living Magazine in Sydney more than forty years ago, to imagine, to experiment, and to create something that did not exist before has always been my philosophy in life.
These works are not intended to document a moment exactly as it happened. They are visual stories, born from Trent's extraordinary life and creative world, and reimagined through my own. The past, beautifully reimagined for today. | The Portraits of Trent Nathan Now
Coty Farquhar | Styling Magazine Australia. | Farquhars Furniture www.stylingmagazine.com.au
