The Founders

The Residency celebrates the lives of Roger and Laura Farnworth.

Roger and Laura had a passion for the wild world. They expressed this in paintings, drawings and poetry. Together, they developed a sense of the world as ‘miracle’: the mystery found in nature but which goes beyond.

Laura at St Agnes - landscape (edited).jpg

Roger was a philosopher, painter, archaeologist and poet. You can read his obituary here.

Laura was a poet, naturalist, lover of wild spaces and a watercolour painter.

"I become more and more convinced of, more and more moved by, the extraordinary nature of almost everything on this planet.

There is a hibiscus flower beyond the window pane now and in the half-darkness its outlines are dim, its scarlet deepened near to blackness, and it moves very gently; it is something to which the eyes return and the mind is baffled."

- LAURA RENOUF, SAMFYA, ZAMBIA (1967)

““The great mystery is why there should be anything rather than nothing at all. This mystery makes everything we see puzzling.

It is why painting is so much more important than most of our activities and why visual experience is the most spiritual. We sometimes call this experience ‘beauty’. I do not mean conventional beauty, but a strong yet elusive feeling that should not be put into words but kept in the non-verbal zone of art. It can be found not only in a fine view or sunset, but in anything, as long as we escape the net of words. If we stop reading the landscape, stop recognizing what we have seen before, then familiarity can fade away and you can see the colours bright and new.””

— Roger Farnworth, Warleggan

"Moon tonight is heart-stoppingly beautiful. I glanced up and saw that flip of fragility in the sky still blue but with a rumour of apricot throughout the roundness of blue into which I stared.

That apricot colour ... there's even a hint of unripe apricot about it, for one sees or thinks the hesitating greenness; and a sigh of violet's there too ... well, how wonderful Warleggan is at such a sky! Never have I known such delicacy so gigantically offered.

The colours are of such an 'almostness' that one experiences something very wonderful ... one's perceptions are so subtly altered that one is tempted on unawares ‘til there's a gentle knowing that you're in the heart of a colour. And somehow the beating there slips a better rhythm to one's own heart."

The Founders

The Residency celebrates the lives of Roger and Laura Farnworth.

Roger and Laura had a passion for the wild world. They expressed this in paintings, drawings and poetry. Together, they developed a sense of the world as ‘miracle’: the mystery found in nature but which goes beyond.

Roger was a philosopher, painter, archaeologist and poet. You can read his obituary here.

Laura was a poet, naturalist, lover of wild spaces and a watercolour painter.

"I become more and more convinced of, more and more moved by, the extraordinary nature of almost everything on this planet.

There is a hibiscus flower beyond the window pane now and in the half-darkness its outlines are dim, its scarlet deepened near to blackness, and it moves very gently; it is something to which the eyes return and the mind is baffled."

- LAURA RENOUF, SAMFYA, ZAMBIA (1967)

"Moon tonight is heart-stoppingly beautiful. I glanced up and saw that flip of fragility in the sky still blue but with a rumour of apricot throughout the roundness of blue into which I stared.

That apricot colour ... there's even a hint of unripe apricot about it, for one sees or thinks the hesitating greenness; and a sigh of violet's there too ... well, how wonderful Warleggan is at such a sky! Never have I known such delicacy so gigantically offered.

- LAURA RENOUF, WARLEGGAN (1978)

Roger’s Art & Poetry

Laura’s Drawings & Poems

Roger and Laura Farnworth Arts Residency