Liam O’Farrell, Artist

Brick Lane at the corner of Bacon St

Liam O’Farrell delights in painting East End markets in all their shambolic minutiae, often returning to the same subject many times to explore the mutable nature of their architecture and communities.

“I moved to London in 1988 from Portsmouth and at first I spent all my time around the West End, in Leicester Sq and Ed’s Diner in Soho, but after six months it stopped giving anything to me,” he admitted, “My sister worked in the rag trade in the East End and she took me to an old pub and showed me around the streets here, and eventually I moved to Hackney and it felt just like home.”

Living here for more than twenty years brought Liam an intimate knowledge of the streets and kindled his desire to devote himself to drawing and painting fulltime. Yet this realisation also led to his departure. “I realised that if I wanted to do more paintings of London, I needed to not live here anymore, so I reduced my overheads by moving to Somerset in 2011,” he explained. “Now I come back to the East End every couple of weeks and I like to draw in short bursts – especially with the cold and the bloody rain – I make drawings for reference and work them up into paintings in my studio.”

In Liam’s pictures, people and architecture are inextricable and, in spite of their apparent realism, these are images constructed from memory – a synthesis of Liam’s perception of a place and its inhabitants, rather than any literal representation. In his affectionate vision, Liam celebrates the intricate details of the markets and the people that make this place distinctive.