Tina Feingold’s exhibit, Wishful Thinking, is now on view at the Danforth Museum in Framingham MA. The show runs through June 8, so there is plenty of time to bring your real physical body and your real seeing eyes into a room filled with luminous works.
I’ve been a passionate fan of Tina’s paintings for many years. She is a dear friend and a member of the Pell Lucy artist collective. I have had her work in my personal collection for a long time, so I engage with her sensibilities every day. I am also lucky to live within walking distance of her home and studio, so we are in steady contact.
Few would look at each of our bodies of work and consider us to be visually aligned. But we share DNA in what we intend visual language to accomplish. Tina has described her own work very eloquently: “mysterious portals into the subconscious, a domain that is immersive, dream-like and surprising.” Add to that the words of curator Jessica Roscio: “Experiencing one of Feingold’s paintings is akin to allowing the mind to wander into a daydream.” Those words resonate deeply for me.
Below is an essay I wrote about Tina’s work, The Flickering of the Familiar. (An edited version is included in the catalog for the show.) I am also including a few photos of the installation to further prod you into a real visit. Having the gallery to yourself will be wonderful even though the crowded opening reception on February 22 was its own kind of joyous celebration.
Just a note for when you visit: In addition to Tina’s Wishful Thinking, another friend and Pell Lucy artist, Kathryn Geismar, has work on view in a group show called Selfhood. Those works are on view in the gallery adjacent to Tina’s exhibit.
(Photo: Mike Mayo)
(Photo: Mike Mayo)
Tina Feingold: The Flickering of the Familiar
Tina Feingold creates paintings that are liminal, luminous, and masterful. Her way of working transcends many of the dichotomies that challenge other artists: the blend of abstraction and representation, image-centrism coupled with atmospheric breadth and depth, the seamless weaving of the familiar with the ethereal. Her command of this visual spectrum reflects years of thoughtful engagement with art and artists, a disciplined practice, and an unwavering commitment to fundamental inquiry.
“My work evolves by applying layer upon layer of oil paint and mixed media,” Feingold writes. “As light, color, and space intermingle, complex and intimate internal landscapes emerge, taking the painting beyond its surface reality. My primary intention is to develop a pulsating, airy atmosphere in which the images can breathe.”
This “airy atmosphere in which images can breathe” is essential to the experience of a Feingold painting. Her suggestive forms—floral bouquets, swirling vines, levitating orbs—come to life in an ambiance where they become supernatural, mysterious, and gravity-defying. Over a century ago, Carlo Carrà described this unique visual power: “Artistic creation… requires a constant effort not to lose the apparitions, which are nothing more than lightning bolts of ordinary things that, when they illuminate, create the essentials so precious to us modern artists.”
Feingold’s work exemplifies the notion that the extraordinary exists within the ordinary. Her paintings are replete with uncanny forms that inhabit an enchanted world—one that holds both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Her compositions brim with resonances, whispers, echoes, and innuendoes. While the spectral quality of her imagery creates an otherworldly aura, her work still remains anchored to a reality that we recognize.
That anchoring serves as a steady reminder of the lush visuality of the world we inhabit. Like Carrà’s “lightning bolts of ordinary things,” her paintings create moments of insight and connection—an experience that lingers long beyond the initial encounter.
The way she applies color and paint also transcends the surface reality. Feingold’s palette shifts from muted tones to vibrant bursts of luminosity. With subtle layering and transitions reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner’s nuanced landscapes, a Feingold painting is both grounded and ethereal, hovering at the edge of materiality. Her visual modulations evoke the movement of memories and emotions through consciousness, from the vivid and vibrant to the veiled and clandestine.
Her approach to painting bears similarities to that of 20th-century master Giorgio Morandi. In his own words, “Even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond.” In the hands of Feingold and Morandi, familiar images become beautifully enigmatic and delicately mysterious. Both artists revisit and reconsider forms that compel them, dynamically reinventing them with each variation. This visual recycling is neither programmatic nor predictable, but a method that is constantly evolving.
Her approach aligns with painter Jake Berthot’s distinction between “system” and “method.” He observed: “You can decide whether you’re going to have a system or a method. Artists like Chuck Close and Roy Lichtenstein had a system—they know how to start and what the end painting will look like. What I prefer is more like Cezanne. He had a clear method of working, but that method was not a closure, but an opening.”
The parallels between Feingold and Morandi extend beyond their art making to their approach to life. Writing about Morandi, Philippe de Montebello noted, “He never fitted into the declamatory, self-aggrandizing mode of the most prominent 20th-century masters. He was a quiet, almost reclusive, and deeply thoughtful man, content to explore his own artistic preoccupations without concern for the expectations of the fast-paced world of artistic fashion.” Feingold is similarly self-directed and extremely thoughtful, quietly producing an extraordinarily rich body of work over the course of her life.
Feingold’s paintings expose the immaterial within the material, an undertaking that has been wide, deep and long. Her paintings discover and celebrate the mysterious monumentality of the everyday. These flickering apparitions, suspended in their airy atmospheres, welcome us warmly into their beguiling realm.