Small Home Gazette, Winter 2023
Dazzling Longfellow Streetscapes
Over the holidays, Bungalow Club founder Kristi Johnson gave my partner and me a beautiful calendar—with bungalows in it!
Local artist Brendon Farley has produced a 2023 calendar that showcases 12 paintings of one of his favorite subjects: the streets of Minneapolis’ Longfellow neighborhood.
“I’ve been working on the neighborhood series for the past eight years or so,” Farley explains via text. “Truth be told, I like to paint what I know and where I live.” Farley thinks of himself as a landscape painter rather than a “plein air” painter: “For the past 20 or 30 years my subject has been nature in general.”
Though the paintings depict Longfellow, they evoke images of any number of Twin Cities neighborhoods built during the bungalow era. They depict rows of houses, mature trees, streets, cars, sidewalks, gardens and refreshingly, even alleys.
Farley’s paintings are delightful. Part of what sets them apart is his exuberant color palette, which is bursting with crimsons; hot pinks; intense yellows and oranges; and luminous blues and greens. The monochrome images on this page are but a pale shadow of the actual artwork.
“My color palette is heavily influenced by the Canadian Group of Seven,” explains Farley. “Their sense of design and color was phenomenal.”
Do a quick internet search for “Group of Seven,” and you will find images of landscape paintings teeming with vigorous natural forms and brilliant hues. The seven painters, also known as the Algonquin School, formed in 1920 and disbanded in 1933. Their subject was the rocky wilds of the Canadian Shield, which makes up about half of Canada’s land mass (and also dips into Minnesota). Learn more at The Canadian Encyclopedia.
“I like painting in a loose manner but still being true to perspective,” explains Farley. “The various bungalow designs of the ‘20s are ideal for that. They are all similar but different. Repetition with variety always makes for good design.”
Farley continues, “A lot of people assume I do house portraits, but I don’t do commissions. It is the neighborhood and landscape that I like to paint. I rarely concentrate on just one specific house. I like how the different designs bounce off of each other.”
Purchase Farley’s artwork and bungalow neighborhood postcard collections at his Etsy shop.
