Sketchbook, 1964

Spiral-bound sketchbook with cardboard covers;
twenty pages of off-white wove paper
23 x 30 cm
Margaret Fisher Fund
2006.30

Paul Feeley was an influential art educator. After teaching painting, drawing, and sculpture at The Cooper Union School of Art in the 1930s, Feeley served as head of the school's newly created department of industrial design. In 1939 he began teaching painting at Bennington College in Vermont, where, with the exception of time spent in military service during the Second World War, he remained on the faculty for more than twenty years. Feeley was instrumental in organizing Bennington exhibitions of the work of Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith.

In the early years, Feeley's work consisted primarily of painted portraits, murals, and expressionistic canvases, but in the mid-twentieth century he began to suppress gesture and representation in favor of a simplified vocabulary of pulsating forms. Feeley's 1964 sketchbook includes bright studies that hint at the freshly colored, boldly abstract patterns of his paintings and sculptures. The application of watercolor washes evokes the paint staining technique he adopted from his former student Helen Frankenthaler.

The sketchbook demonstrates the geometrical formulations through which Feeley developed his signature shapes. In an interview published the same year that he worked on the sketchbook, he noted the significance of studying working drawings to understand creative practice. "Among the things I loved about Renaissance art, perhaps [what] I liked best, were all the guide lines and perspective lines that were left in the drawing. Maybe in some respects I like the drawing better than Renaissance painting, because all the sub-dividing ideas that show in the drawings in the most explicit way, were removed in the painting. . . . It took a long time to discover that an item in the process was what I really liked about art. . . ."(1)Lawrence Alloway, "Opinions of Paul Feeley," Living Arts 3 (April 1964): 43.

The sketchbook reveals Feeley's own use of graphite axis marks as guidelines for arranging the undulating patterns of his shapes. Several of the designs, titled after constellations, playfully replicate clusters of stars. Each page reveals an investigation of forms at once independently captivating yet suggestive of endless variation.

1. Lawrence Alloway, "Opinions of Paul Feeley," Living Arts 3 (April 1964): 43.