Farrell's focus for the past twenty years has been primarily still life, but one of her long-term goals was to find her way to portraiture. She always felt her still life paintings were in themselves portraits - mostly paintings of solitary subjects set against a spare background. As a self-taught painter she had many periods struggling to figure out technique, or color, or how to trust her instincts; that you can't always apply what you are seeing, and that sometimes you have to rely on what you're feeling.
In much the same way she wanted to paint people. In the past few years she has been giving equal time to portraiture, exploring the nuances that come with painting a subject that is living, breathing and expecting a certain outcome. Farrell loves early portraiture, the kind that many people qualify as Naive or Folk, the kind of painting that in its simplicity, reflected back something of both the painter and the sitter. This is the kind of painting Farrell likes to do. She is not sure why she decided to make her first show of portraits about clowns. The clown is many different things to many different people. As much as these paintings are about her, and the clowns, she thinks they are really about whoever happens to pass by.
