James Feehan: "being stalked by intuition"
"Oh, I would never claim Tiresian authority, but Tiresias is that sixth sense in everybody: you're always being stalked
by intuition. Tiresias is voicing what is unconscious: the shadow recognition that haunts the action. It is the poetic
faculty, I suppose."
--Seamus Heaney
James Feehan would never claim such authority either, but it is plainly his faculty too--as an artist. He paints with
the eyes, but like blind Tiresias, like poet Heaney, he really works, really sees, with something else. He's "stalked by
an intuition" that he (and maybe this is what makes any artist) is sufficiently aware of to beware of--to respect and
allow to work.
Feehan's images have always evoked something of the past, often a village past of ceremonies and celebrations
with hints of religious occasion. To view his work is to drop into another time, a no-time, really, where allegory and
metaphor lightly tug the eye beyond what the eye can see. Something like a "shadow," something dimly recognized,
plainly "haunts the action" while insisting on remaining unnameable. Like all real art, his paintings thus wield a knife
of sorts and will kill the vision they offer in the mind and heart of their viewer if, vainly, he insists on knowing it,
possessing it, too deliberately.
All that makes it great stuff to look at and live with, and damnably difficult stuff to describe. All real art is difficult in
that way, of course. Thus the great composer, asked to explain a piece, silently begins to replay it, or Robert Frost
says over and over again no, no, if i'd meant that I'd've written that.
But still, to speak at my own risk: it seems to me that Feehan mediates our human dilemmas, our human being, most
beautifully. He's a magician and a go-between--a dweller in the spaces between knowing and unknowing, motion
and stillness, memory and forgetfulness, most obviously perhaps past and present. Between the matter of the body
and the energy of the soul. He brings quietly fraught moments into being and presents 'em to us as if to say "here,
you who work so busily amidst the flux--look--enjoy if you can and make of it what you will, what you must. I give you
a figure. Is it Washington as a young man? (Or only a revolutionary-era re-enactor?) A fisherman? (Or a fisher of
men?) He holds a fish, certainly. But here he is (is it still he?) holding a chicken, an oar, a cat, an accordion, a
sword, a lamb, a ladder, a sprig, a child--a fool's wand complete with shrunken head. Is it his own head? He's
surrounded by birds and cows, and dogs, so many dogs, as well as men and women (a band, a family, a military
company, a crew of dignitaries) in strange and perhaps old or foreign dress, looking like they've stepped out of
tintypes from somewhere we once knew and have lost, and would like to know, to go to, again. Am I not right? So
go...."
They're dreams, of course. (The jealous art gods raise their knives, rightly.) They "voic[e]" the "unconscious," even
though, increasingly in fact, they're set amidst places that are plainly real, are here, or were here, right in Feehan's
own neighborhood--Bowman's Tower looming over the Delaware, say, or the site of the old ferry that once went
between New Jersey and Pennsylvania at what are now Lambertville and New Hope. Some of the places, and
people, too, for that matter, are refugees from other dreams by painters like Stanley Spencer, David Aronson, Grant
Wood, Ben Shahn: they belong to a company, in other words, even greater than the groups of musicians or soldiers
or swimmers that, chorus-like, serve to sustain and critique them.
The conversation is a large one, between elements of the work itself, between the work and Feehan's visible world,
between that world and its past--even between the work and the tools he uses in making it. For you can catch
traces of the drawing becoming the plate, the plate becoming the painting; and you can see, or imagine, how the
image itself emerges from the primal soup of color, with a "hiatus," as Feehan calls it, seeming to require a figure
here or a Durham boat there....
So put down your knives, and I'll surrender this pen: out of respect for this boatman whose work is a way across, a
way of adumbrating the ever necessary crossing--of being, like us at our best, beautifully and altogether between.
WRITTEN DAVID CANTLAY