Delaware painter creates self-portraits to navigate faith, gender and more

A shrimp hunches over a computer in a cubicle, its posture promising back issues for decades to come. A rabbit with a bloody stump where its lucky foot once was gambles away its life savings at a casino. A young adult catches up with his childhood stuffed animals in a bar as they get wasted on juice boxes.

These contrasting subjects appear in paintings hanging on the walls of CAMP Rehoboth. Each represents some aspect of the painter, Farmington artist Logan Farro — more specifically, his bad posture, bad luck and wistful nostalgia. These are just a few examples of the many self-portraits he’s created as he’s navigated young adulthood.

Farro, 23, taught himself how to paint during the COVID pandemic, which began when he was a junior in high school. The next year, he showed a painting for the first time at a CAMP Rehoboth show. 

“The painting doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone. I threw it away. Either that, or it got shredded. It was atrocious,” he joked. “There’s been a lot of improvement since that one painting.”

A longtime CAMP Rehoboth volunteer, Farro is now the LGBTQ+ nonprofit’s visual arts coordinator. His first solo exhibition, “Active Imagination,” is on display until Oct. 27.

Farro’s presence in his self-portraits is often not immediately obvious. For example, one painting depicts his favorite tchotchkes, like a blank-faced Smiski keychain, dangling from the bones of his rib cage. 

Another two pieces depict a pixelated Farro before and after several years of gender-affirming care. The striking, greyish green eyes are the same, but the contrasting haircuts and body types make the two subjects seem like completely different people.

“People ask me about my gender identity all the time. I don’t really have a clear-cut answer. It’s like, ‘Well, here’s a painting to explain exactly how I’m feeling,’” Farro said. “If I could just be this blank, genderless subject, not a man, not a woman, just pure Logan, I would do that.”

Painting has been a way for Farro to accomplish that ideal.

“You can look at these and get your own idea of (me) and get the ideas I put across. But you don’t need to know what I look like,” he said. “It allows me to step out of myself and express myself in a different way that I might not be able to physically.”

The most recent self-portraits in the “Active Imagination” exhibition take inspiration from Farro’s identities as a queer person and a former Catholic.

“Obviously, as a queer person in the church, I’ve heard, ‘You’re not going to heaven. You’re going to burn in hell forever. God doesn’t make mistakes,’” he said.

In response, Farro created a series of paintings showing how each of the seven deadly sins manifest in his life. 

The sins are more playful than emotionally fraught. Farro appears in a stained glass style, swiping through dating apps (lust), guzzling coffee (gluttony) and taking selfies (pride). The most wrathful habit he could come up with was squashing bugs underfoot.

“If a bug is in my house, I’m not a catch-and-release type person. If you are in my house, you entered my domain, and you are going to pay the price for it,” he joked.

The series served as Farro’s application for a 2026 Delaware Division of the Arts fellowship. He procrastinated starting the paintings until two months before the deadline. That experience, ironically, served as inspiration for his piece on sloth, which shows him crouched in an hourglass, buried in grains of sand.

Farro hopes his work inspires others to explore aspects of their identity through artwork.

“It’s shocking to me, the amount of people who don’t have creative hobbies,” he said. “Over time, it just becomes a part of you.”