Time Is Ripe for ‘New Juice’ Sculptor to Show Work

When Dorrit Fitzgerald, curator at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, asked Karin Feuerabendt-Steinberg to submit work for a show last year, the artist did something Fitzgerald said she never expected from a 27-year-old graduate student: She said she wasn’t ready to show.

Fortunately, this year she was willing. Her sculpture well may be the best reason to go to the center’s third annual “New Juice in Orange County,” a show of seven little-known local artists.

It is tempting to describe her most impressive piece, “Untitled No. 1,” as a large necklace, but it is more of a modern amulet. First, one is drawn to a slat of burnished bronze, reaching high against a wall. With its embedded weave of metal threads, it looks like the elongated neck of a stylized guitar.

It descends to the ground, pulling the eye with it to a delicate circle formed by a single wire. This line’s wide, spatial embrace, punctuated by sparsely scattered washers or beads, resolves at the viewer’s feet in a cluster of metal strips, in the staggered pattern of piano keys.

Analogies help but also diminish. A rhythmic transit between openness and containment seems to be a theme of this composition, which is delicate without being the least bit tentative. It carries a suggestion of ritual power, as well as psychological meaning.

“That piece is very peaceful to me and it also has presence,” said Feuerabendt-Steinberg, a petite blond woman who is nearly finished with her art studies at UC Irvine. “I like to get as minimal as possible and still have something to say. I like to be very simple and then put it together.”

The show includes several other persuasive examples of her strong compositional sense. “I had never seen anybody, graduate or undergraduate, who was that diligent or focused,” said curator Fitzgerald, who met Feuerabendt-Steinberg in a UCI printmaking class in 1981, when the artist was a sophomore.

“I don’t think she had any experience as a printmaker,” Fitzgerald said. “She would come in and work in a corner. She didn’t talk to other people and was always concentrating on work, with a cigarette in her mouth and her head down in the plate.

“These prints were just piling up, day after day,” Fitzgerald continued. “I started watching what was happening with the prints, and I noticed these threads working out of the pieces, these lyrical threads. . . . A lot of the students would leave without trying a print just one more time, that extra time that makes it work. She’d do them over and over.”

Feuerabendt-Steinberg, who reluctantly agreed to an interview, lives in a small student apartment at UCI with her artist-husband, who earns his keep as a construction worker, and their 2-year-old daughter. Feuerabendt-Steinberg’s prints cover the walls, as do parts of a large sculpture, stored by hook and nail like garden tools in a garage. In one room, a small, curvilinear sculpture rests on a table.

The prints are colorful monotypes that are pressed from a thin layer of oil-based paint on a metal sheet. Feuerabendt-Steinberg’s work in the medium seems to spring from an instinctive if still-maturing understanding of artists she most admires: Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

The Russian-born Kandinsky believed that non-representational shapes and color could convey feeling as effectively as music. Klee, a Swiss, devised a highly personal idiom, a sort of modern hieroglyphics of suggestive figures and symbols. Both men’s work was so distinctive it could easily be identified without looking at the signatures.

That degree of individuality is a lot to ask for from a graduate student, but it begins to be approached in Feuerabendt-Steinberg’s specific yet unforced work.

Feuerabendt-Steinberg, born in Illinois, moved during childhood to Corona del Mar with her German-born parents. “I always enjoyed making art, doodling and things, but it never was that important in my life before I went to the university,” she said.

She took art to fulfill an undergraduate requirement and quickly felt the tug of a natural attachment. “When I started I was very impressed by Picasso, but I grew out of him and into Kandinsky.”

She watched her interviewer as if to be sure he was listening. Then she went on: “When I started going to school, I had a lot of anger. That was due to some personal problems, and through art I started to discover the possibilities that shapes and beauty can give you. It was intriguing to me to draw a shape and have it work. I think that was the beginning.”

One definition of being an artist emphasises the ability to forge an imaginative authority from one’s inner life. Feuerabendt-Steinberg started by drawing cubist, Picasso-esque faces that were clearly attempts to give her anger a human form. “A lot of people could not see a face, and I did,” she said, holding up one of the early pieces. “Then I stopped putting my anger into the faces and just left the faces, and then I dealt with shapes that I saw in the composition.”

What happened to the anger? “I think it’s not gone completely, but it did lessen,” she said. “I don’t want to put that into my artwork anymore. I don’t think it helps, anyway. I just think it is not necessary.”

She said her pieces start with a conscious search for an idea but then take on a separate life.

“You push at the beginning when you start a piece and the more you work at it, it’s almost like you could become part of the piece and you let the piece guide you. You don’t get up-tight about it. I always feel like, when you are working on a piece and if something goes wrong or something breaks. . . .” She paused. “That is a message that something has to change.”

In the piece? In her life? “Both,” she said--laughing, as if it were obvious. “I feel that means that you have to be open, just open to things that are happening to you during the making of things.”

When a visitor commented about an admiring review that “Untitled No. 1” had just received, Feuerabendt-Steinberg smiled and said, plainly, “That was nice.” She paused. “I used to think about wanting to be a successful artist, but now I don’t. It isn’t as important to me as staying involved with the work.”

Many artists, Fitzgerald said, quickly tie their self-respect to the approval of others, to the responses of critics, dealers and curators in an art world more devoted than ever to public acceptance as the ultimate value. She does not worry that Feuerabendt-Steinberg will succumb to that climate.

“I think that I would encourage more of Karin’s attitude in other young artists,” she said. “Patience is something you don’t see a lot of these days. But it can make all the difference, waiting until you really know what you are about.”

“New Juice in Orange County III” continues through Aug. 9 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave., Irvine. Hours: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays. Admission: Free. Information: (714) 552-1018.