There is a new episode on my YouTube channel about two terrific exhibitions. “Double Bill: The Art of Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson” is at the La Jolla Historical Society; and “Manny Farber: An Upbeat Title” is on view at Quint Gallery in La Jolla.
I have written many reviews and stories about both of these artists in the last forty years, so it was extremely gratifying to talk about their work for this episode. Hope you enjoy it.
La Jolla Historical Society
Double Bill: The Art of Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson
November 8, 2025 – February 1, 2026
Quint Gallery:
Manny Farber: An Up Beat Title
November 8, 2025 – February 7, 2025
Hi, I’m Bob and this is Art with Bob Pincus.
Talking about Manny Farber. I first met him in 1985 when I came to San Diego. He was going to have an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)j in Los Angeles, actually. So I went over to UCSD to interview him.
What makes Farber’s painting special
Well, I think it’s just the multiplicity of things to look at. I mean, he just gives you so much to see. He described his paintings as kind of like force fields that force you to look around and through them rather than at them, just at them cause your eye has to go many different directions, right? Also, the great color. Look at all the uses of color. I mean, the oranges and reds, the greens, blacks and whites. Yeah, he really varied his color and a lot of that, give credit to Patricia. She was the one who mixed his colors often and suggested color schemes, so she played a big part in the way his painting evolved.
Patricia Patterson’s painting
It would be tricky to call Patricia a realist. I think she is a realist, but she’s a realist also who is very expressive in the way that she paints people. Not only that, her color sense. If you look at the paintings, the color in the paintings related to the frames, too. And a lot of those color schemes really came from her. And if you go back into Manny Farber’s paintings, he took a lot of inspiration for his color and his palette from her, and he talked about that as well.
So anyway, I think the difference in her paintings from his is they both look at domestic life, but she’s sort of looking at the domestic life from the Irish perspective, the home and the hearth of her friends. Whereas he’s painting their domestic life in the sense of, assembling all the things that is interesting in their life and putting them into the paintings.
One quote I might give you from one of Manny’s paintings is, he said, “There is nothing insipid about domestic life, and there’s nothing insipid about gardening.”
I actually had seen Patricia Patterson’s work when I was still writing in Los Angeles. She had a gallery called Newspace. In fact, there’s a case to my left here that has a lot of sketches and notes from them. And there’s a note that references that art dealer, Joan Gordon, very loquacious women. Anyway, so I had a little bit of orientation toward Patricia’s work. But then of course, when I moved to San Diego, I became a critic here, I saw it much more frequently. And, but raised the question of like, why has she spent so much time painting her Irish friends? And the story’s interesting. Starting in the 1960s, she started spending a lot of time going to the Aran Islands, a particular island, Inishmore, and became very close friends with some of these people. And two of them are on the wall here in these paintings. So she’s kind of memorialized them in these paintings. And in the case to my left here, there’s photographs of them. And you can see the interesting transformation from photo to painting.
Manny’s tabletop painting – Steve’s Stencils and What Students Say
Manny would assemble his life in these tabletop paintings. So, for example, Steve a la stencils make their way into the painting. Patricia’s garden makes its way into the paintings. Also little notes he would write to himself. He would reproduce these notes in the painting. So you can see over here there’s a little note down there. Then there’s a very cryptic note, “Too many sports pages.” So who knows what that’s referring to? Maybe he didn’t like the paper that morning.
So it’s kind of like daily life makes its way into the paintings. And he talked about how he was really interested in the idea of moving you through the space of the painting, that it had multiple things in it. He loved multiplicity, not having you have a focal point, but actually move your eye around the painting. So relating to his idea of termite art burrowing into the painting and circulating through it. You can kind of see that, even though it’s figurative and it’s very accessible, it’s not organized in the way a typical figurative painting would be organized, right?
Another thing about his paintings is if you look closely at him, he used the palette knife a lot and a stick more than a brush, which kind of makes for the distinctive style. You can see he scraped a lot when he makes his images, rather than painting them very flowingly or fluidly. So I think that was really part of his interest in using the materials that he did. And you can see there’s a lot of scattered stuff in them. It’s like a scattering of your life that day, you know, even though it’s not only diaristic, but it’s partly diaristic.
Quint Gallery – Seed Field and Hellth
We’ve moved our commentary over to Quint Gallery now and I’m standing in front of a much bigger Manny Farber painting titled Seed Field. He’s still doing kind of this idea of like everything laid out in a certain kind of way to make your eye move around the painting. But here we’re talking about a bigger scale. So the idea of seeing things or how you see them is sort of shifted because you have these sort of some of the things look life-size and some of them look like they’re maybe expanded a little bit.
This kind of geometric structure, it kind of anchors the whole thing because the other thing seems somewhat random, right? But the geometry kind of anchors the whole thing. And then you have a lot of things, like things from their garden, the rake, I’m assuming big sunflowers, right? And then the rebar, which shows up in a lot of paintings because that sort of relates to his idea of construction, his carpentry background, the idea of constructed paintings, you know, made on board. All these paintings are on board, not canvas. So big constructed surfaces.
This one is very much a, kind of a, it’s like a subdued painting color, but if you look at the whole gallery of paintings, you see the really, the huge eclecticism in the color. From bright to subdued to light to dark. And I think that’s a big part of these paintings. But anyway, I like, I’ve always liked the way this painting used the subdued color and the black and the white.
So I thought I’d talk for a minute about this very large painting behind me, Hellth.
I do need to point out that if you read health here, it’s H-E-L-L-T-H. So there’s a little bit of a commentary I think on, well, maybe too much of a, what, too much of a organic thing, maybe he was reacting against that a little bit. It is very lush painting, right? Look at all the stuff in it: pumpkin, big leaf plants, lots of flowers. Again, he’s really, has little notes to himself all over the painting. Down here is one that says, “Change, fix it.” Excuse me, “Change, improve, fix it.” I think that’s kind of, no idea what he’s talking about, but I’m sure it meant something to him. But I think it’s kind of a, it’s a painting which feels exuberant and yet has a little bit of a kind of a sardonic undercurrent to it.
From the Mid-Eighties
From the Mid-Eighties. I felt like he wants to use color that’s a little bit brash and a little bit bright because it’s sort of like the 80s was sort of a little bit gaudy and kind of showy. It’s about that whole idea of like, you know, excess. And I noticed of course in the painting lots of allusions to the 80s. Everything from David Byrne to David Byrne’s song title, “Burning Down the House,” to Tina Turner to Joe Montana. It’s very involving because you hone in on details. And then you try to take the details and then you try to incorporate it into an overall view. But on the other hand, you really can’t have, there’s not one overall view. Your eye keeps moving through and around the the canvas because of the way he sets up the objects and the forms.
A table from Manny and Patricia’s home
That little table actually comes from the home of Patricia and the late Manny Farber. The things on it are props which are meant to evoke things in their paintings. They’re not actually objects from their home. So you look at it, there’s like a little toy train track there, toy train.
So if you go over here you got the train tracks again in these earlier works from the 1970s. What I’ve liked about these works over time looking at them is the way that it plays with the idea of scale. You have the building, you assume maybe it’s a life-size building, maybe it’s a toy building, I don’t know. The people are obviously disproportional to that if that’s a big building. And then you’ve got the scattered publications or photos or whatever. And again, notes to himself which he loves to put in everything. It has fun with the idea of constructed worlds and probably no accident that it comes from his Auteur series about movies. And then this one over here is like a giant note, a magnified version of the little notes you see in the paintings. So it’s almost like an open page with a cryptic remark, something, means something to Manny, go for tricks.
The notes in Manny’s paintings
The notes are always fun, right? You can never tell whether the note’s going to be trivial or serious, but it seems like he just kind of puts them in at, maybe not at random but to kind of create mixed signals about what’s going on. Like something’s big in life and something is just daily, like a daily reminder.
Like he’s talking about the painting itself. So it’s like how it should be structured. So reminding himself not to structure it in a different way so you don’t know whether he succeeded or not, but you know what he wanted to do. It’s almost like he’s talking to you also, sometimes.
You know and then of course once you know the notes are actually painted that’s sort of interesting too, right? It’s not like he collages a note into it. He actually repaints it. So it’s not collage, literally. It’s really one big seamless painting that has collage elements in it but it’s not a collage in any way. The only collage element you can have is you imagine what it looked like when he was painting on the tabletop because it’s a tabletop’s perspective. So all the things that he kind of placed around and painted, and you don’t even know if they were all there at the same time or not or he’s moving them around or changing from day to day until he finishes the painting. But I think it’s kind of involving in a way.
You kind of burrow in and move around, go through the painting and around and you keep moving around. So I think that’s what he’s trying to do with your eye, the same thing as what his concept was. That it was not one structure, but making you create the structure.
Robert L. Pincus 
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