Professor Emeritus 'Manny Farber: New Drawings' Exhibition Review

By Robert L. Pincus, Union-Tribune Art Critic, June 5, 2008

Plants, vegetables and fruit have long been part of the picture in Manny Farber's figurative paintings. The view has generally been from above, as if they are placed on a table.

Not so in his newest solo exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art. The illustrious San Diego artist has moved outdoors. He's drawing in the garden at his and Patricia Patterson's home, a lush world of flora and architectural details.

Patterson is a marvelous artist herself, though she has never made the garden a subject of her drawings or paintings. She has made her reputation with subjects much farther afield.

The title of this show, “Manny Farber: Drawing Across Time,” resonates in different ways. It refers to a year spent making these drawings. But rendering nature is also a way of measuring our own time, our own sense of mortality – which no doubt exists as a backdrop to the work itself for the artist, who is now 90.

Changing mediums provokes changes in Farber's style – greater attention to line and freer use of it. Still, there is strong bond, a sense of style that carries over from panel to paper: his great use of color and the attraction to unconventional vantage point.

The attention he pays to this garden is a loving homage to it. The images themselves, 68 in all, are tightly arranged in rows on one long wall. Each vertical column is, to borrow a Farber phrase, a story of the eye, as it scrutinizes the same place in different ways, over time: one group of plants, one fragment of walkway, one section of pale wall with bright blue window.

This is ultimately a show about how one small place can yield a seemingly inexhaustible range of pictures. The richness of detail in any given picture is one of its pleasures: the intricacy of line he employs to evoke brick; the interplay of thick mass and thin line to depict bushes and stalks.

An artist overlays vision onto nature, architecture or any other subject with a sense of line that is his or hers alone. A lifetime of making art has given Farber's line a personality as distinctive as a fingerprint. And in making Patterson's garden his subject for these drawings, he is wedding his artistic expression to one form of her artistry. Taken together, these drawings are a love letter to art, to their life together and to his love of a place they have shaped over many years.

--------------
Original Story at SignOnSanDiego.com by the Union-Tribune: http://entertainment.signonsandiego.com/events/manny-farber-new-drawings/