SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

WITH A PEN AS HIS WORD AND ME AS HIS WITNESS
Michael Fink
Rhode Island School of Design
He left his parents’ house and fought in World War II. He came home as a wounded G.I. for a
short stint, mostly to heal and to wait. But once took off out of town, he never turned back. He
let go a trunk of his youthful sketches in the cellar. His childhood sculptures, like the books he
had pored over, he forgot in the attic. His paintings hung on the walls of the parlor, but he
made no claim on his past—or so it struck me, until quite recently.
Over the years, I often made the sentimental journey to wherever my uncle, Herbert L. Fink,
lived with his wife Polly and their family. They spent some seasons with her mother in
Glastonbury, Connecticut, while he taught art classes at Yale. They moved to Carbondale,
Illinois, and retired to Rockport, Maine. I made a number of visits to their Victorian townhouse
by the seacoast and made a film about his studio there, with my R.I.S.D. colleagues, Peter
O’Neill and Merlin Szosz. But then, my uncle surprised me.
He created a series of drawings from his memory of the world we had shared. Herb is my
double uncle. He was the ringbearer at the wedding of his half-brother, my father, to his
cousin, my mother. He drew that event, the dawn of my own world, as the marriage of a
delicate girl to a more earthbound man: around him stand the beasts of the jungle, boars and
bears, the symbols of the aggressive business world and clan into which she had entered like a
princess in a folktale. He sent me this genre series, a sepia study set in the Providence of the
1920’s.
And then, during the millennial winter, he sent me another group. This time, he recalls the
summer colony we formed in our Fink compound at Oakland Beach. There, he built his own
skiffs and small sailboats. He draws them and, perhaps based on a few snapshots saved from
the depression era, the members of the extended family who stay fixed in his mind and
memory. He included in the marvelous package a pen and ink souvenir of his bar mitzvah at
Temple Emanu-el, a fanciful fantasy of me, his nephew, transformed into the very image of the
Jewish bridegroom, with my wife’s face featured but in the style of the Jewish bride of east
Europe. He continues the motif, using me as the imaginary model for the Wandering Jew, the
Fiddler on the Roof, and the Jewish Poet, garbed in the Chassidic costume and coiffed in the
Orthodox way.
Perhaps my favorite of these representations and digressions is the portrait of Samuel Raphael
Fink, Herb’s half-brother, my father’s younger sibling. “Who else will remember him?” Herb
prints, or writes, in his left handed calligraphy, underneath this memorial. Uncle Sam was the
only truly religiously observant person in the household and clan. When he was born, his
mother died. Sam would hallucinate, evoke her image in the sky. He never failed to light a
prayer candle in her memory. It was not only a formal loyalty. Sam was a dreamer, an idealist,
even an intellectual, always studying biology, art history, religious philosophy. In a business
family, city, culture, nation, time, he paid for his spiritual nature by living in the shadows,
seeking refuge in asylums. Nevertheless he performed with honor and with heroism in World
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