Stephen Farthing

In November 2010, Farthing became the second living Royal Academician to be featured in the "laboratory" series of one man shows at the Royal Academy of Arts London. "The Back Story," featured an epic 30 foot painting of the Atlantic ocean.

Toward the end of 2009, Farthing had his first one-person show at the Purdy Hicks Gallery in London where, for the first time, he showed the "back-story" paintings. The "back-story" paintings are a series of images painted with a text in reverse sitting on the picture plane between the audience and the image. The text tells us what is going on not in the picture but behind it, so compromising and at the same time informing the image with text. His technically very skilled paintings all seem to be grounded on one guiding principle - that what we see will always be always conditioned by what we know.

Farthing described his work in a 2005 interview, saying "I have dined with the devil in terms of becoming a modern artist. I have taken hold of history, tried to understand it—and then used and abused it."

Farthing moved to New York in 2000 to become the Executive Director of the New York Academy of Art and led the Academy until he became the Rootstein Hopkins Research Chair of Drawing at the University of the Arts London in 2004, a position he held until 2017.

Farthing was elected as a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1998. Farthing's work is in the National Portrait Gallery and he also showed at Tate Britain in 2006 as part of a project called "Drawing from Turner," that he designed and curated. Farthing also painted large murals for the Cleveland Browns Football Club in Cleveland, Ohio (2004) and Aston Villa Football Club in Birmingham, UK (2008).

During the 1990s, he reinvented history painting as a viable contemporary narrative taking on subject matters as diverse as the Battle of Trafalgar, swagger portraiture, and the topographical mapping of cities. His most recent work makes explicit a theme that has consistently sat between Farthing and his audience, the "narrative" and "text".

In the late 1980s and early 1990s whilst showing with Edward Totah in London, Farthing showed works that positioned Latin American vernacular culture within a modernist idiom and classicism within the vernacular.

Since his return from Italy in 1977, Farthing has had one-man shows in the UK, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Australia, Japan, and the United States. Farthing's work featured in the 1989 São Paulo Biennale and that same year he served as the Artist in Residence at the Hayward Gallery in London. He also won prizes in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition on eight separate occasions between 1976 and 1999.

Stephen Farthing's teaching career began at Canterbury College of Art (1977–79) where he was a lecturer of painting. He went on to teach at the Royal College of Art (1980–85) before becoming the Head of Painting and later the Head of Fine Art at West Surrey College of Art and Design (1985–89). Farthing spent the next ten years at Oxford University serving as the Ruskin Master at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. He was also made a Professorial Fellow of Oxford's St Edmund Hall (1990–2000). Upon leaving the university in 2000, Farthing was made a professor emeritus of St Edmund Hall.

Stephen Farthing grew up in London and earned a bachelor's degree from Saint Martin's School of Art in 1973 and a master's degree in painting from the Royal College of Art, London in 1976. In the final year of his master's program, Farthing won a scholarship to study at the British School at Rome for one year.

Stephen Farthing RA (born 16 September 1950) is an English painter and writer on art history.