The featured artist for the next 3rd Friday with The Artist is Billy Farmer.
The 3rd Friday with The Artist will be held at the Franklin County Arts Council’s Gallery on Main, located at 118-B North Main Street, Louisburg, North Carolina, on Friday, July 19, 2019, 6-8pm. Be sure to stop by and visit with our artist at the Pop-Up display at the rear parking area of Gallery On Main.
Wilson native Billy Farmer is one of North Carolina’s best known contemporary realists with an impressionist eye for color and impressionist hand for lively brushwork. His paintings are his personal testimony to appreciating the natural beauty of our indigenous landscape and the inviting ambiance of small town life of North Carolina.
Working in acrylic and watercolor, he is known for his fresh pictorial immediacy, capturing season, special moments and the ambiance of locale…one can even sense the breeze and distant growl of a lawn mower. From farmland to village storefronts and coastal environs, Farmer connects to these vistas and vignettes not as a tourist but as a North Carolinian and invites his viewership to see through his eyes.
His paintings are found in numerous collections both private and public. A dedicated artist there is no time when Farmer is not involved in painting whether it be commission work or an inspired scene. Besides a following of collectors, he has many devoted students in Franklin and Wake Counties; in acknowledgement he was awarded the 2014 “Franklin County Artist of the Year.”
Although a well-known visual artist, Billy Farmer’s life career until recently has been music. He is a graduate of Atlantic Christian College, now Barton, and continued his studies in music at Chapel Hill, NC State and the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a retired music teacher from the Wake County Schools, has been a big band leader and jazz pianist. Upon retirement from teaching, Farmer reinvented himself as a painter by attending workshops with notable painters like Charles Reid, Tony Van Hasselt, and Arne Westerman, and professional critiques with Joe Cox and Ben Williams.
Farmer’s Art will be on display and for sale at the Gallery on Main from July 19 through August 9, 2019.
Source: Ellen Queen, Franklin County Arts Council
