PAINTERS: Divided, Yet One In Art : Life Styles: Married painters Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson are a team in spirit, if not in style.

“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.

“I wasn’t conscious of it, but afterward it seemed almost as though I’d created a vocabulary of the objects and things and people on the island, the single fundamental elements of the place,” she said.

After meeting Farber and becoming immersed in the world of film and film criticism, her work began to take on more of a narrative quality. The same subjects, observed during regular return visits to the island, now appear in her paintings surrounded by their natural contexts. Together, these individual glimpses, like scenes from a film, define characters, places and the plots of daily life.

Patterson’s presence in Farber’s work is harder to target without his help, but he is unusually forthcoming on the subject.

“Almost all of the things that are in my paintings come from Patricia, except the techniques,” he said. “The compartmenting (of space), the subject matter, the idea of building paintings out of your personal life, as a single thread. Basically, I’m a copycat.”

“Don’t believe it,” she laughed, but Farber only dated his debt to her even earlier.

“The abstract work was the same way,” he said, referring to the large, expressionist paintings he made in the 1960s and early ‘70s. “The paintings were on the floor. She would get up on a ladder and tell me where to draw the lines.”

Patterson shook her head and smiled at the exaggeration.

In Farber’s more recent work, however, her presence is impossible to dispute. The paintings--which local art historian Sally Yard compares to the “tipped-up still lifes of Cezanne” in the new Quint/Krichman catalogue--contain a clutter of clues to Farber’s world. Within the trail of written notes, images of strips of rebar, rolls of masking tape, flowers and vegetables, are abundant references to Patterson.

One large painting-in-progress, laid out on a table in Farber’s studio last week, held several ripe tomatoes from her garden, placed where they would be painted, and an envelope with a comment that Patterson had recently made scrawled across it. Because Farber never credits the sources of his notes, they read as his own diaristic jottings. But the words that appear in his paintings are as likely to have come from his wife or his daughter Amanda, also an artist, as from Farber himself.

“Manny is kind of amazing like that,” Patterson said of her husband. “He’s very open to new things coming into the work. If it’s passing through his world, he’ll pull it into the painting.”

And his world--the house, the studio, the garden--is thoroughly infused with Patterson’s own taste and style, her preference for luminous color and clean, orderly space.

“Did she influence me?” Farber asked. “You see it all around you, the color. She works in bright colors and stripes and architectonically. Wherever you look,” he said, motioning around him, “you’ll see the way she operates. My work changed dramatically when we met.”

Though his paintings have moved closer to hers in terms of their representational style and personal content, both artists adamantly defend the differences between them. Still, the titles of their works, which they often devise together, can sometimes tell of deeper affinities in approach. One of the installations in Patterson’s current show is called “Everyday Theatre,” not far from the title of one of Farber’s paintings of the ‘80s, “Domestic Movies.”

Artists married to other artists are not uncommon--Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Elaine and Willem DeKooning are just three examples from this century. But typically, the situation has hindered the woman’s career, confining her to the shadow of her husband and leaving her talents to be fully appreciated only after her death.

Patterson recalls that when friends would visit their New York studio in the late 1960s, they would automatically give more credibility to Farber’s work than her own. That didn’t sway her from her course, however, for she felt their reaction had more to do with trends in the art world then, which favored Farber’s brand of abstraction, than with sexism.

“I think it was because (my work) was representational,” she said. “It was autobiographical, it was about Ireland, and because I was younger. All of those things added up to ‘not as serious’ in people’s minds.”

As she anticipated, that perception didn’t last long, and now she, like Farber, gets ample attention from galleries and museums nationwide.

At UCSD, Farber and Patterson were one of three married couples teaching in the Visual Arts Department. That, too, may have helped nurture their acceptance as equals.

“It’s very sane, and very good,” Patterson said. “It’s also very good for the students to see women artists and men artists all on the same footing. But we all work very separately from our mates, we’re used to carrying on professional lives separate from them.”

In her 30 years of traveling to Ireland, for example, Patterson has never been accompanied by Farber. That, they explain, is due to “that great division” between their personalities and backgrounds. Farber, the self-proclaimed judgmental, opinionated son of Russian Jews, said he “won’t go anywhere where there’s not a news stand.” Patterson, the descendant of Irish farmers, feels at home in the village of Kilmurvey, population 11.

“I think I’m a rural artist and Manny’s an urban artist,” Patterson proposed. “It sounds like a joke, but I think there’s some truth to that. He’s a real city person and I’m a country person.”

Farber agreed, but then, he seemed willing to defer to all of Patterson’s statements, as much out of actual agreement as aversion to answering a question himself. He will speak freely about their differences in technique, however, for he feels that paintings themselves tell much more about an artist than the details of his biography.

“Almost at every point we differ a great deal in the way we operate,” he said. “I take about six weeks to paint a picture. She takes two days. They take a lot longer than that in total time, but she works very fast. I mix color constantly, and she paints almost like watercolors, it’s so immediate. We could both draw the same thing, this lemon, but it would be totally different in look and feel.”

That, Patterson feels, is a plus.

“I find it very exciting that our work is so different. It feels very free, that we don’t have to even think about it. He does what he does, and I do what I do.”

Similarities between them may indeed be few, but parallels and intersections abound. Both Farber and Patterson experience a rich reciprocity between art and life: She extends the vibrant colors of her paintings to the door and window trim of their house; he takes the daily mail and makes it part of his paintings.

And when it comes to those all-important “basic values,” Farber acceded that he and Patterson are likely to be very close.

“We probably like the same kind of art and reject the same kind of people.”

Patterson’s show, “Bed Ground Dog Table,” continues at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery (1140 W. Mission Road, San Marcos) through March 6. Hours are Tuesday 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Wednesday-Thursday 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Friday 10 a.m.-2 p.m. and Saturday noon-4 p.m..

Farber’s new paintings can be previewed at a reception tonight from 7-9 at Quint/Krichman Projects (5270-B Eastgate Mall). They remain on view through March 16 at three locations: 5270-B Eastgate Mall, 7447 Girard Ave. and 7316 Eads Ave. Hours are Saturday 11 a.m.-3 p.m. and by appointment (454-3409).