the house
An Acre of One’s Own A PAINTER TRANSFORMS A HOME, A STUDIO, AND THEN HER LIFE IN WEST TAGHKANIC
By Mary Angeles Armstrong Photos by Deborah DeGraffenreid
J
ean Feinberg doesn’t know who really saved whom. The painter, who explores geometry and minimalism in her work, had been searching for 15 years when she found the complex of gardens and digs she would eventually transform into her own homestead. “I loved being outside of the city and had spent quite a bit of time in the area while teaching in the summer program at Bard,” Feinberg says. She wanted an upstate retreat with a studio to balance her busy life in Manhattan, where she was an assistant professor of fine arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “However, I was hesitant—it was a big leap for me to buy something on my own, as a single woman.” Then, in 1995, she struck on a place with potential: A one-acre property, with a hodgepodge of buildings—including a dilapidated cottage, a workshop-garage with an apartment above, outhouses, and a chicken coop. “It was truly an overlooked, kind of forlorn place,” she remembers. “But it had a really nice sense of place.” Built by one family in the early part of the 20th century, it had sat empty for years. “I loved the tall white pines lining the driveway, the old lilac trees and the energies that abounded here. The fact that the place was a bit eccentric appealed to me—I wanted to transform it into something special.” Another appealing aspect was the garage apartment: It was immediately livable and still completely furnished. “It was full things left by the original owners—furniture, tools in the basement, wine kegs, and even Mason jars of tomatoes and pears grown from the property,” Feinberg remembers. She could move in right away and begin rehabilitating the small cottage into her studio space. So, she took the leap and bought it. She didn’t realize that, over the years, embracing the challenge of bringing the place back to life would transform her and her art practice as much as she transformed it. “I needed to do something big and challenging—to stretch myself. I was transformed by being able to express my creativity in other ways beyond my studio practice.” 26 HOME & GARDEN CHRONOGRAM 2/20
Jean Feinberg rescued a forsaken summer cottage near Lake Taghkanic and transformed it into her 400-square-foot, year-round art studio. Lining the walls, various iterations of her oil paintings explore an abstract motif inspired in part by her experience rejuvenating her property. “For years I’ve been playing with very intense, flat and uninflected color against either raw wood or found wood,” explains the former teacher. “I found my path to working this way from the delight of having so many color chips around me as I was painting the house. Color can shift so much in intensity, value or hue, and each of these shifts influences feeling as well.”