Michael Felber

Michael Felber
September 18, 1946 - June 12, 2019
Artist Michael Felber of Port Townsend, Washington, passed away suddenly on Wednesday, June 12, 2019, at the age of 72.

He is survived by the love of his life, his wife, Karen Hackenberg; and his sister, Diana Felber and family. His cousin, the "other" Michael Felber, followed him in death, shortly thereafter, in November of 2019.

Michael was born in London, UK, September 18, 1946, to Dora and Isidor Felber. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors who had fled the Nazis – Dora from Riga, Latvia, and Isidor from Leipzig, Germany – to England, where they met and married.

Before Michael's birth, his family experienced the London Blitz. His mother moved north with his sister to the English countryside in order to survive the war. His father stayed behind in London, and continued working, to support his family and the war effort.

In 1949, Michael's family made the voyage to America on the Queen Mary. His first memory from childhood was being fascinated by the ship's brass railing as he clung to it during the crossing. The family settled in Great Neck, New York.

Though Michael and his family acclimated to life in America, he retained a mid-Atlantic, sophisticated British sensibility, as evidenced by his Racing Green MGB, the only car he drove for 24 years. That MGB carried everything: gear for hiking trips with his wife, heavy loads of lumber for projects, and of course his beloved dogs. Over the years, Michael modified the MG in various idiosyncratic ways, to accommodate his and the car's various ailments. Once, for example, after a skiing accident had left him with a torn Achilles heel, Michael cleverly rigged a wooden cane to the clutch pedal so that he could manually engage the clutch.

When he moved to San Francisco for the Summer of Love in 1967, Michael embraced wilderness and the American West. He settled briefly in the hills above Santa Cruz, California, spent a brief sojourn on Mount Shasta, California, and lived for many years in San Francisco. Eventually he settled with his wife on the rugged coast near Port Townsend, where the Olympic Mountains were in view and easily accessible.

Michael and his wife Karen met in 1974 in Boulder Creek, Calfiornia, in the foothills above Santa Cruz, when she visited his intaglio print shop to learn to make etchings. They reunited in 1983, married some years later, and spent thirty-six loving and creative years together as artists.

Michael was a mountain adventurer, a sailor, a kayaker, an old-time backup as well as rock-and-roll rhythm guitarist, and an avid amateur astronomist. He was a passionate lover of animals.

One of his favorite activities in the Northwest was to hike solo in the Olympics for weeks at a time, looking for wildlife, his backpack filled with all the safety equipment he could carry. His cousin, the "other" Michael Felber, nicknamed him Mikey Armageddon, as he was always at-the-ready while carrying his carefully chosen assortment of emergency gear.

Michael remained a soft-spoken gentleman, though paradoxically wild and adventurous; he loved to tell hair-raising stories about his adventure-from 1960s Haight Ashbury to his experiences with wild grizzly bears and polar bears in his later years. He narrated his tales with self-effacing glee and a twinkle in his eye, and dramatically acted out irreverent and hysterically funny jokes. He was a natural storyteller, a gift he inherited from his mother. His parents' naïve perceptions of his wilderness adventures kept Michael's wry sense of humor well-honed - as illustrated by one of his favorite stories:

On one of his solitary hikes in the Olympic mountains, Michael was carrying a little too much weight in his backpack and ended up straining his Achilles tendons. When it became too painful to walk any further in his hiking boots, he cooled his heels in the chilly waters of a river. After three days of not much improvement, he used moss and duct tape to fashion heel lifts for his Teva sandals and was able to comfortably hike the long miles back to his car.

Afterward, while talking on the phone with his sophisticated urban mother, she asked what he'd been doing, and he told her the tale of his innovative success. "Oh, Michael!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you take the bus?"

There are so many stories: there's the one where he was following his friends to the beach and flew off his vintage BMW motorcycle on the East Side Highway, New York City; the one where he took a wrong turn on a hike up Mount Shasta, California, and ended up watching a huge boulder slide down a knife-edge peak right in front of him, bounce, go airborne, and shatter in a thunderous shower of stone below.

No one who knew him will ever forget his soft raspy voice and giggly laugh. He was a kind and generous man in heart and soul, dearly loved by his wife and close friends.

His passion for wildlife and the preservation of the natural world is evidenced in his masterful and meticulously detailed drawings and paintings of wild animals he observed in their native habitat on his many trips to Katmai National Park, Alaska, and to Svalbard and Greenland in the Arctic. His most recent artworks focused on exquisitely drawn and oil-painted images of grizzly and polar bears, emphasizing each individual's life force, beauty, and unique penetrating gaze.

Michael received an MFA in printmaking in 1972 from the San Francisco Art Institute after studying engraving with renowned printmaker Dolf Rieser in London, England, and he worked as a master printer of etchings for the well-known workshop of Bob Blackburn, NYC, and Garner Tullis' workshop in Santa Cruz, California. He also taught printmaking at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Hartnell College; and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

The toxic effects of printmaking chemicals made him ill, so Michael retrained himself in classes at San Francisco State and embarked on a new career as an animator.

He worked for Hanna Barbera on the Flintstones TV show; for the now cult feature film The Plague Dogs under Disney's first female animator, Retta Scott; and then for hand-animated TV commercials in the 1970s and 80s. When animation went digital in the 80s, Michael turned to book illustration and began a career drawing animals and insects for books, posters, t-shirts, and magazines.

He exhibited his work in museums and universities around the U.S., Europe and Australia, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum, the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, the Denver Museum of Natural History, the Whatcom Museum, the Museum of Northwest Art, the New York State Museum, the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, and the South Australian Museum.

His work received many awards, and is in the permanent collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Museum of Northwest Art, The Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the New York State Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the University of Dallas, Hartnell College, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and the Norton Museum.

To honor the memory of Michael and his passionate work to protect wildlife please donate in his name at https://www.theuproarfund.org/donate/ to support his good friend Chris Morgan's new venture, Uproar. Donors should please add this wording to the comments box on that page: "Donation in memory of Michael Felber for Chris Morgan podcast 'THE WILD.'"

Chris Morgan is a conservation ecologist who works through education, film, science, expeditions, and campaigns to highlight wildlife conservation in fresh, fascinating ways. His personal mission is to help make conservation a part of everyday life for all individuals by inspiring people to love wildlife and wild places, and by creating solutions that intertwine human welfare with the health of our planet. He is obsessed with wild places, and is never happier than when sharing them with others – either in person, or through education and film.

A Facebook page has been set up at https://www.facebook.com/michael.felber.7712 and friends are encouraged to post photos or written memories of Michael.