Nashville Arts Magazine

Farrar Hood | Finding Her Muse

Nashville native Farrar Hood, daughter of photographer Robin Hood, recently returned home to the Music City. Closing a chapter on her life as an artist in New York City, she has traveled back to her roots. Hood was raised on photography. She grew up taking tiny footsteps behind her father on photo assignments. She was personally trained in art lessons with her parents. Hood says these experiences “built up a visual language” in her mind “from a very early age.”

Hood left Nashville for graduate study at the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. There, she earned an M.A. in art history and an M.F.A. in painting. She notes that before attending Pratt, her work was portrait-based, but she says, “Graduate school forced me to home in on my intention with paint.”

Lush paintings infused with artificial light and executed in minute detail, Hood’s works represent the marriage of her divergent influences. She sets up props, backdrops, and models into a meticulous arrangement and photographs them. Clearly she is her father’s daughter: one source of her inspiration is the photograph. For Robin Hood, photos offer a final product; for his daughter, they represent a starting point.

Until recent months, the theme of the sleeping woman has defined Hood’s canvases. The settings of her paintings and the appearance of her subjects remain diverse, but each image captures a woman lost in an unconscious state. These subjects inhabit a dream world that is dislocated from the experience of the viewer. Often, they twist their hands as if in struggle or contort their bodies into painfully unnatural poses. Their worlds are electrified by a tremor of nervous activity in spite of their rest. Hood says that depicting a sleeping subject allowed her to “strategically place bodies in more interesting compositions.”

Rising Cool features Hood’s sister asleep on a floral chair balanced precariously between the floor and wall. The subject appears so lost in her dormition that she has been swept up and moved against the wall: the sensation of transport permeates the arrangement. The intricate diamond pattern on the wall and ceiling is actually from Hood’s childhood room. She remembers that the wallpaper sometimes felt like a protective enclosure and at other times like a “constrictive net.” She captures this dual reality in the busy pattern that surrounds the clinging, twisted body of the sleeping woman in this painting.

The inanimate objects of Hood’s paintings manifest a tangible, palpable presence. Based again in her choice of subject and style of arrangement, these objects reveal texture, presence, touch. Such visceral, tactile elements define the lavish realism of her work.

Since returning to Nashville, Hood has taken a new direction with her painting. “In the last six months I started to resubmerge myself in painting. I was more interested in developing my art than in developing a New York art career. I had to allow myself room to step back and look.” Inspired by these changes, she has begun a new series of women waking. She is now painting “women who are active, awake, moving toward something. [They are] to some degree about struggle and changing patterns in life—moving out of one state and into a higher conscious state.” These new works echo Hood’s personal journey, both aesthetic and geographic, to find her own muse.

Hood has an upcoming exhibit at Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Center October 1–November 1. Opening Reception and Gallery Talk: Thursday, October 1, 5–6:30 p.m.

You can view Hood’s gallery online at www.farrarhood.com.

by Deborah Walden