Painter, born in Gateshead, County Durham, who studied at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art. In 1993, he gained the Arthur Andersen Award for Figurative Painting, in 1999 The Sargent Fellowship, British School at Rome. Group shows included Death, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 1988; Picturing People – British Figurative Painting 1945–1988, British Council international tour, 1989; Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Art Gallery, from 1992; Postcards on Photography, Cambridge Darkroom Gallery and tour, 1998; and Saatchi in Sheffield, Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1999. Fairnington’s solo show Staying Alive at Mobile Home in 2001 transported subjects from seventeenth-century still-life paintings into a Disneyesque vision of life, all in meticulous detail.