SAN DIEGO — "I'm not part of this interview," Manny Farber said at the outset, as his wife, Patricia Patterson, set out iced tea and home-grown lemons. Farber didn't stop talking, despite the disclaimer, but he made his resistance known.
Patterson gently prodded him to cooperate, then carried the weight of the interview herself as he retreated to his studio.
Their paintings, however, give another side of them. They are about life, about their lives, but they are not autobiographical, both Farber and Patterson insisted.
In his paintings, the defiantly self-protective Farber spills his private thoughts across the canvas. In hers, the generously conversant Patterson steps back and becomes an observer of the lives around her.
Farber and Patterson have lived and worked together since 1967, first in New York, and since 1970, in San Diego. They married in 1976. Both are acclaimed painters who also wrote film criticism together in the 1970s, extending a career that Farber had begun decades earlier on his own.
Both have been teaching at UC San Diego since they moved to California. In 1988, Farber, then 71, retired from teaching and shifted his studio from the campus to their Leucadia home, where Patterson designed a large, airy work space for him. Patterson, 49, does much of her planning and reading in a smaller loft upstairs, but she continues to paint and construct her installations at her UCSD studio.
For the first time in recent memory, both Farber's and Patterson's work can be seen in concurrent local exhibitions. A show of Farber's new paintings opens tonight at Quint/Krichman Projects, which just published a catalogue of Farber's work from the 1980s. Patterson's show, including paintings and installations, opened recently at Palomar College's Boehm Gallery.
Though the shows overlap in time, they don't coincide in style or specific content, Farber and Patterson agree. Nevertheless, each artist is quite present in the other's work, either literally or implicitly.
A painting in Patterson's show depicts an easily recognizable Farber having an outdoor lunch with their friend and studio assistant, Steve Ilott. When she was 20, Patterson moved from New York to live with a family on one of Ireland's Aran Islands for two years. Her paintings from the period show a single object or person centered on the canvas or page: a wagon, haystack or pet dog, a friend saying the rosary or washing dishes.
