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Fall 2002

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Painting poetry
Oriole Farb Feshbach '74 inhabits several worlds

Faye Wolfe




	DRAWN TO THE UNKNOWN: Oriole Farb Feshbach in her Amherst studio.

W.B. Yeats had damning things to say about "the fascination of what’s difficult." The difficult, he said, "dried the sap out of my veins." For artist Oriole Farb Feshbach (M.F.A., ’74), the fascination of what’s difficult is a source of inspiration. Studying poetry, delving into science, tackling the challenging medium of watercolors – Feshbach pursues what doesn’t come easily. The result is art that illuminates the meaning of a poetic phrase or the mystery of a comet streaking across the sky. Some of Feshbach’s meditations on who we are and the world we live in were on display this fall in a retrospective of her work, "Omens in Nature," at the university’s Hampden Gallery.

Omens for her career in art can be found in a childhood spent in a home with Tibetan art and custom-made furniture, her early love of the "visual aspects" of religion, her interest in aesthetics as a philosophy and religion major at Sarah Lawrence College. She didn’t get going on that career, though, until she was 40, when her younger son was in high school, and she entered the UMass art department.

"I was thrilled to get into the program," Feshbach remembers. The ’70s were an exciting time to be a student in the art department where there were such talented working faculty artists as John Roy, George Wardlaw, Hanlyn Davies, and John Grillo – but no women professors. Compensating for that absence was the presence of women TAs, grad students and undergraduates. Feshbach also recalls with a laugh having "almost more attention than I could deal with" from her teachers – and from faculty who weren’t her teachers. "You got to know all the ones you didn’t have," Feshbach says. "Everyone was available for critiques." There was tremendous "colleagueship."

The collegial atmosphere prevailed after Feshbach got her degree. In the late ’70s, she was part of Artists.Research.Technology, Inc., (ART) a group whose members included several UMass art professors and whose purpose was to apply new media and mechanisms, e.g., computers, to making art. A book Feshbach created back then using offset lithography, on exhibit in the fall show, explored her connections to nature, friends and family. A more recent book, Illuminations (1991), pairs William Carlos Williams’ "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," with art she created in response to the poem. In the foreword, another poet, Stanley Kunitz, wrote that her collages "brilliantly complement the poem with a reciprocal act of the pictorial imagination."

Reciprocity is key in Feshbach’s art. Her high-ceilinged, compact studio is also a library of art, science and poetry books and files of photographs and imagery of natural phenomena. "I like to take two things and integrate them," she says simply. "I use a series of sketches to explore a problem." She adds modestly, "And I throw a lot out." For example, one painting began with a phrase of D.H. Lawrence: "a faint lost ribbon of rainbow." Feshbach went through her collection of photographs of rainbows, then combined watercolor and pastel to create "Unweaving the Rainbow," also in the retrospective. Other work features meteors, arctic waterscapes, starfish and rainbow trout. Feshbach acknowledges that rendering a rainbow in a new way is hard: "You can go into Hastings [stationery shop] downtown and find all sorts of things with rainbows on them. I talk to myself constantly. I let it go, breaking it up, working with how it would look reflected in water – I run with it. I try to bring the science in. I like that a rainbow is ephemeral, and I like its color."

Feshbach gets, she says, "a pretty steady flow of commissions" for portraits (she has painted historian Henry Steele Commager and Stanley Kunitz). She also paints her family. Sometimes the cosmos creeps in. In a portrait of a grandchild (she has 11), "Miriam, Star of the Sea," a pensive girl is seen in profile against a background of a streaking universe. Faces aren’t any easier than waterscapes. "I worry all the time, ‘Will it work?’ I’m fighting for an eye or a nose," she says with a smile, "in the same way I fight for a fish."

Whether it’s to be found in a familiar face or "remote places, the Arctic or the stars," Feshbach is drawn to the unknown. That’s one reason she belongs to a poetry-reading group, which has tackled H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and translations of Russian poets. But she’s also receptive to the pleasures of the known. For years, she and her husband, Sidney Feshbach, a City College of New York professor, spent summers in Amherst. When he retired, they moved to Amherst for good. From the front of her house there is a dramatic view of the Pelham hills. Out back, seen through a large studio window, is a garden, where in summer hummingbirds dart among the bee balm.

"Moving here from New York City," she says, "every day is a personal victory," one that may start with her "lying in bed in the morning doing work in my head" and may end with her "reading in bed." Sidney supplies her with reading material: "My husband loves books; he reads all the time and I try to paint all the time." Like most artists, finding time to paint, among the responsibilities – and pleasures – of a full life can be hard: "I have to fight for time. I have to say no to things sometimes."

In her studio, she loves those moments spent "working out a composition, and when I first get the color in, and the very end, the refinement of the work, bringing it up stronger." In between, she may get "sick of being meticulous, a slave; I want to enjoy the medium, the color, the paper." About the process, she says, "One small thing can be pleasurable. I try not to rush the end." In Feshbach’s work, there are many things, small and large, that are pleasurable to see, reflections of a life that finds many sources of wonder.

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