Donald Farnsworth

Donald Sheridan Farnsworth (born July 18, 1952, in Palo Alto, California) is an American artist and inventor. Farnsworth now publishes artworks at Magnolia's 8,000-square-foot Oakland, California warehouse location, both under his own name and in collaboration with his wife, artist Era Hamaji Farnsworth.

Farnsworth's own work often draws from his interest in the intersection of art and science. Early works on paper combined precise architectural renderings of classical Greek and Roman columns and archways with "the addition of unusual textures and designs" such as abstract patterns or fragments of antique Japanese script. His Origin: Specimens, a suite of prints depicting hyper-realistic, digitally captured images of insect and bird specimens from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco overlaid onto the complete text of individual chapters from Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, was exhibited at the Fresno Art Museum in 2007 and at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2011. The Nevada Museum curator writes: "..he raw data of Darwin's text reveals Farnsworth's admiration for the epistemology of science. By subtly locating the specimens within a scientific context, Farnsworth reminds viewers that a considerable wealth of observation-based research informs the development of scientific theories like evolution."

In his capacity as director of Magnolia Editions, Farnsworth also works with a wide variety of contemporary artists to produce works on paper, multiples including Jacquard tapestries, public art commissions, and other fine art projects. Describing her experience creating an edition at Magnolia, painter Inez Storer writes: "The collaborative process at Magnolia involved working directly with Farnsworth who is himself an artist and therefore understands the artist mentality."

Some of the artists who have worked with Farnsworth since Magnolia's inception include William Wiley, Squeak Carnwath, and Rupert Garcia. The latter's work at Magnolia has taken a variety of experimental forms, indicating the unorthodox nature of the studio's projects: for example, Garcia's earliest collaborations with Farnsworth were a series of automated CAD pencil drawings which allowed the artist to create a series of editioned multiples of a hand-drawn graphite portrait of Robert Motherwell; later publications with Garcia have included collography, woodcut, Jacquard tapestries, and digital inkjet prints on paper, panel, and fabric. In his introduction to the catalogue, Farnsworth writes: "Our place at the crossroads of analog and digital demands that we consider both the artist's hand and the mark of the media. Every media has its own mark: as media grows more complex, increased care must be taken not to let the heavy hand of technology dominate the hand of the artist."

Michael Danoff, Chuck Close, Donald Farnsworth, and Brad Pitt in front of Close's 2009 tapestry portrait Brad at PaceWildenstein, New York on May 1, 2009. Since 2006, Farnsworth has been artist Chuck Close's main collaborator on an ongoing series of editioned tapestries and prints. Farnsworth and Magnolia have been instrumental in developing the technique behind Close's series of watercolor prints, which have been called "the artist's first in-depth experimentation with the possibilities of digital technology."

In a 2014 interview with Terrie Sultan, Close named his "two great collaborators" as the late Joe Wilfer and Farnsworth, saying: "now I'm working with Don Farnsworth in Oakland at…Magnolia Editions: I do the watercolor prints with him, I do the tapestries with him. These are the most important collaborations of my life as an artist."

Inventions and innovations In addition to various commercial patents (e.g. Patent nos. 20080110071, 5089806, and 20100005692),

Farnsworth is credited as one of the first artists to seriously explore digital printmaking.

Magnolia Editions has published a number of editioned Jacquard tapestries by artists including Close, Bruce Conner, Masami Teraoka, Hung Liu, Kiki Smith, and various others. These publications rely upon a proprietary color matching process developed by Farnsworth. While working on a 1999 commission for artist John Nava to decorate the interior of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, Farnsworth put his "advanced knowledge of color theory and practice" and his "innate [understanding] that combinations of different colors could be read by the human eye as a single hue" in the service of developing digital weave files that maximized both the available color gamut and the fidelity of colors to the artist's vision.

Education, handmade paper background, and teaching Farnsworth received a BFA in 1974 from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MA in printmaking in 1977 from the University of California at Berkeley.

In the early 1970s, Farnsworth began making paper on his own after purchasing a used laboratory Hollander beater. He soon found that there was a growing demand for handmade paper from artists: During this period Farnsworth also made handmade paper for artists including Claes Oldenberg, Nathan Oliveira, and Brice Marden; made paper pulp for sculptural casting by Manuel Neri and Bella Feldman; and worked on art production with Harold Paris and Karel Appel. Farnsworth and colleague Bob Serpa also taught inexpensive classes in forming and couching handmade paper at their Oakland, California studio.

In 1997, Magnolia Editions published Farnsworth's A Guide to Japanese Papermaking: Making Japanese Paper in the Western World, a 62-page illustrated manual describing procedures for creating handmade Japanese washi paper.

From 1975 to 1986 Farnsworth was an associate professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts; in 1987 he was a guest associate professor at the University of California at Davis while serving as president of the board of directors of the World Print Council. From 1988 to 1992 he served as a Guest Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, after which he taught at the University of Hawaii in 1992 and served as Guest Artist/Instructor at Creative Growth in Oakland in 2003. He served as a Guest Lecturer at San Francisco State University in 2003–2004 and at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011.

In 1979, Farnsworth received a Contributions to the Field Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982 and 1988 he received purchase awards and commissions from the World Print Council and the San Francisco Graphics Arts Council. In 2003, he appeared in BOMB Magazine as Bruce Conner's "Artist's Choice."