Doctor and artist. These are just words to describe someone who cares with both hands
and soul. Someone who has moved through hospitals, forgotten borders, and indigenous
villages, learning over time and through listening that there are pains science cannot
reach. It was there, in the silence of riverside communities, in the humid heat of the forest,
that Farley realized art is also a form of healing.
His art is not a refuge from science, but its continuation through other means—a visual
report of a body he knows intimately: the Amazon. For him, the art of caring and the art of
creating “cannot be separated,” and each canvas is the manifestation of a diagnosis
executed with the rigor of a scientist and the empathy of a doctor who has witnessed life
pulse in the deepest villages of the forest.
His gaze is clinical. When he examines the Amazon, he sees the symptoms of a systemic
illness at a “tipping point.” Forest clearings are not mere gaps in the landscape—they are
wounds on the planet’s skin. River pollution from mercury is not just an environmental
issue; it is evidence of a “cyclical and irreversible process” of poisoning, an intoxication
that accumulates in the tissues of all living beings. He does not paint the idealized forest
we wish we had, but the sick body he has auscultated.
The depth of his diagnosis comes from a medical history no university could teach. His
immersion in indigenous medicine revealed the patient’s original state of health: “respect
for the home (the forest) and conscious use of its resources.” This ancestral wisdom is the
lost standard of normality, making the current pathology even more tragic. His art
emerges from an acute awareness of the fracture between the memory of a balanced
body and the reality of a wounded organism.
Once the diagnosis is made, what is the prescription? Art. Farley believes it “transforms,
metamorphoses, shapes, and sculpts the human being.” His canvases, with their “tones of
green, blue, yellow, and red,” are not a representation of the forest, but a transfusion of its
vital essence. They are an attempt to inject the “identity of the natural” back into
collective consciousness—a prescription of beauty and memory as tools for rebalancing.
The artist’s gesture and the doctor’s touch converge in the same ethic: “respect, technical
skill, and precision.”
His work confronts us with brutal lucidity. Farley recognizes that the terms “diagnosis and
prognosis” reveal a disease already underway. His art does not offer a magical solution. It
is the report that forces us to face the severity of the condition. And the final prescription
lies not in the colors, but in the call to action they inspire. Hope, for him, resides in
“preserving and reforesting” as ways to “mitigate the impacts already caused.” His art
does not show us the image of restoration—it provides the prescription for our survival.