LONDON.- The Royal Academy of Arts presents Artists’ Laboratory 02, featuring the recent work of Stephen Farthing RA. The exhibition displays a selection of drawings and large scale paintings, made since 2005, all of which examine the artist’s preoccupation with looking beyond the surface of the visual image by exploring the story behind the work. Farthing has mixed writing, painting and drawing in varying proportions to produce a sequence of works that take aspects of the history of painting as their subject matter with a view towards better understanding how words and images can work together. Many of the drawings in this exhibition started life as a creative response to the work he carried out as executive editor of 1001 Paintings You Should See Before You Die. Farthing said ‘I decided to set the acquired knowledge of working in the studio, to turn what were masses of facts into something useful to me