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News Briefs featuring Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber
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Neil Farber in COMPLEX magazine
Updated January 17, 2012
Canadian artist Neil Farber is a man of great wit. His mix of mythological and psychological characters interact on crowded canvases, forming bizarre narratives and unconventional stories. You need to look closely, and when you do a whole world of "WTF?!?" is revealed and the whole exercise is worth it. Click the thumbs for more examples of Farber's work.
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Telegraph Journal reviews CONSTRUCTIVE ABANDONMENT
Updated August 25, 2011
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber are the founding members of an influential art collective from Winnipeg called The Royal Art Lodge (R.I.P.-1996-2008). This is a collection of contemporary representational art, beautifully rendered in a compact hardcover edition.
Drawn and Quarterly rarely disappoints when it comes to either graphic novel or art books. The transcendent and childlike paintings are often humorous in their naïveté but there are also darker discordant sides to the pieces, and therein lays their strength.
Dumontier and Farber's paintings of animals and people, sometimes hybridized, seem to be bestialized by the burden of existence. The interaction between the text and the image is very powerful, funny and melancholic, violent and surreal, demanding an active reading from the reader/viewer.
In one of the paintings, a dejected man sits uncomfortably in a chair with a blue hand puppet, arm extended, the caption reads: "He would win back the children." The reader immediately imagines a bereaved father, what could he have done to lose his children? Moreover, the dismal attempt of an isolated man to win back his children with a hand puppet.
Some of the images are more cryptic, and elude a facile interpretation, such as, the image of a white coffin teetering on the top of a boulder, engulfed in darkness, the caption reads: "At the bottom of the world, a coffin full of stars."
The Book, Constructive Abandonment, like the title suggests, is an abdication of good for what ails you.
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CONSTRUCTIVE ABANDONMENT is "charmingly absurd" says Uptown
Updated August 4, 2011
The Royal Art Lodge disbanded in 2008 but founding members Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber still collaborate. They recently published a book of illustrations called Constructive Abandonment (Drawn & Quarterly). The paintings in the collection feature adults, children and animals in charmingly absurd, sometimes melancholy situations. Most of the pictures have some text that complements the image. I'm especially fond of the animals, such as a horse and mouse hitting the road with a cardboard box labelled "Squeak and Chester’s Stuff."
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National Post wowed by the absurdity of CONSTRUCTIVE ABANDONMENT
Updated August 1, 2011
Every Wednesday evening, Michael Dumontier heads over to the home of his friend Neil Farber, takes a seat at the kitchen table, and spends the night painting with his fellow artist. Canvases are traded back and forth, each adding details to the work until it is complete, a process that often requires multiple sessions. Farber estimates they've collaborated on "thousands" of paintings over the years, 61 of which are collected in a recently released survey of their recent work, Constructive Abandonment.
The work featured in the book, which is published by Drawn & Quarterly, is at once horrific and hilarious: A man dubbed the "manicorn" sits contemplating the horn growing out of his forehead; an "African Fellatiating House Frog" suckles a table leg; an alligator and monkey re-enact an episode of Dragnet; a pirate sentenced to walk the plank is reassured that "nympho mermaids" await him below the surface; a suicidal dog imagines running away from his owner and leaping off a nearby bridge; and, just when things couldn't get anymore bizarre, a sword-wielding raccoon comes to the aid of a man fighting a green dinosaur.
"The beginning of the process is very loose," Dumontier says of the pair's artistic methods. "We add things to the paintings rather indiscriminately at first. But there's a point where we have to slow down and talk. If a painting is created by combining random elements, we'll talk about how to tie those elements together. We can do this by adding more, or by writing a text that gives the image context - often both."
If you are versed in the strange aesthetic of these two Winnipeggers, the paintings found in Constructive Abandonment should come as no surprise; Dumontier and Farber are two of the founding members of the Royal Art Lodge (may it rest in peace), the legendary collective that has introduced the art world to the likes of Marcel Dzama. Although the Lodge officially dissolved in 2008, Dumontier and Farber have continued to work together - an alliance that has existed for roughly 15 years.
"It's really comfortable at this point," says Farber, on the phone from his home in Winnipeg, while Dumontier chalks up the duo's success to "a lot of hours of trial and error. We've developed a way of working together, which has little to do with the way we each work on our own. For me, it's a nice break from the time I spend working by myself in the studio."
Although their work is often visually stunning, the punchlines, for lack of a better word, frequently come from text, not images. A man with a sock puppet becomes even more tragic when you read his intentions: "He would win back the children." A shadowy figure tossing a garbage bag off a boat becomes even more sinister thanks to a caption describing the bag's contents as "decapitated head, bowling ball." The image of a wizard looking down at a giant toad gains new meaning thanks to the addition of the word "irrevocable." And the painting of a man with a frog-like creature perched on his shoulder could be the start of a short story when you learn "they arrived in Europe to find that audiences were no more receptive than the ones at home."
Dumontier agrees that the captions, which come last, have become the most important part of their work.
"We often spend more time trying to get the words right than we do making the paintings themselves. We have a book called The Synonym Finder by J.I. Rodale that has become our most valuable resource. It's better than any thesaurus I've ever seen."
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Design Week shakes the midsummer blues with CONSTRUCTIVE ABANDONMENT
Updated June 27, 2011
If, like some of the DW team, you were thrown into a grump after the realisation that following tonight's midsummer eve the days are only going to get shorter, then new book, Constructive Abandonment, by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber may well appeal.
The book, which has been realised by Canadian independent publisher Drawn & Quarterly (well worth checking out, if you haven't before), features a series of child-like, often humorous, paintings of animals and children weighed down by the pressures of life.
The book offers up often comic and sometimes moving scenes, including a manatee delivering a first aid box to a drowning man, a sword-wielding chap and racoon fighting a dinosaur and a young boy retching into a towl with the caption 'Grandma's Potroast'. There are also some excellent visual examples of the 'werge' - including a 'Manicorn' - half man, half unicorn - and 'Grampoline' - an elderly trampolinist.
The strength of the paintings is their naive style coupled with the incongruous, and sometimes dark, captioning. It's an entertaining read, charming enough to shake off even the most stubborn Midsummer blues.
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Juxtapoz Magazine adores CONSTRUCTIVE ABANDONMENT
Updated June 6, 2011
Book Release: "Constructive Abandonment: Michael Dumontier & Neil Farber"
Thursday June 02, 2011
COVER
The Royal Art Lodge was one of our favorite art collectives ever assembled (Michael Dumontier, Neil Farber, and Marcel Dzama), and two founding member, Winnipeg's Dumontier and Farber, have continued to collaborate and have a new book just released, Constructive Abandonment. The book is published by Drawn & Quarterly.
The book sits at 7" x 7", with 64 pages of Dumontier and Farber's small paintings, quick absurd comedic moments that the two have been known for. As Drawn & Quarterly notes, "the text varies from straightforward to even more abstract and nonsensical than the images that it accompanies. The paintings reference child’s play or literature and some are seemingly without reference, completely untethered.
We have a 14-page interview with Mr. Farber in the upcoming July 2011 issue of Juxtapoz. Stay tuned for it.
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