Kelly FearingTRIBUTE

Kelly Fearing

For almost seventy years, TXB Tribute Artist Kelly Fearing has pursued his indi-vidualistic vision with extraordinary sensi-tivity and craft. In meticulously rendered realist works and pungently hued abstract color studies, he has created settings for contemplative thought. Fearing’s isolated saints, poets, and visionaries inhabit rocky cliffs, deserts, and isolated beaches, nurtured by rough, lonesome terrain. The beautifully articulated ani-mals, birds, and fish in other works are physical manifestations of the spiritual power his seekers pursue.

Fearless isolation and inner strength are at the heart of Fearing’s enterprise. Like the great Renaissance works by Bellini, Durer, and Piero, his paintings are goads for meditation. Their crisp focus and stark compositions reflect their subjects’ seri-ous hard-won thought.

Kelly Fearing is the last living member of the Fort Worth Circle, a group of blithe spirits who, beginning in the late 1940s, worked outside every clichéd notion of Texas culture, staging productions of Shakespeare, improvising ballets at private parties, and developing an urbane style of abstract and figurative painting and print-making completely current with the prevailing modes of New York and Paris. Working in a heartland that didn’t really care what they were up to, these artists were energized by audacity and fearlessness, animated by their own sense of independence.

Kelly went on to teach in the Art Depart-ment of the University of Texas in Austin for forty years where he developed his signature style of spiritually heightened realism. While many of his works are set in the hilly terrain and backcountry around Austin, Fearing spent most sum-mers in California (with his companion,

musician Albert Gillis) and settings taken from trips across the New Mexico and California deserts and mountains appear regularly in the work. Trips to Nova Scotia, Greece and India were also crucial sources of inspiration.

Absurdly, Fearing’s work has been labeled as “regional” by traditional art historians. But his extraordinarily sophisticated paintings and drawings more than hold their own with mid-century narrative and magic realist works by artists like Mor-ris Graves, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo. Fearing’s draftsmanship is reminiscent

of the quality of works by great American art-ists like Paul Cadmus, Leonard Baskin, and John Wilde. His sumptuous color studies rank alongside those of Harry Smith and Oskar Fischinger as dazzling synesthetic efforts, successfully melding the realms of music and visual art.

The TXB 2009 group shows both include selections of Fearing’s works that provide a context for the independent thinking and finely honed craft evident throughout. Fearing’s use of vibrant color, his extraordinary sensitivity to animal and plant life, and his creation of al-ternate esthetic realms make his works seem completely contemporary, on common ground with the art of the younger TXB artists. - Michael Duncan

CHECKLIST Mexican American Cultural Center INSIDE TOP LEFT: Spirit Deer at a Yellow Edge, 1970, Oil on linen, 22 x 28 in. INSIDE BOTTOM RIGHT: The Place of Tobias and the Angel, 1955, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Boy in a Tide Pool, 1948, oil on canvas, 23 1/4 x 16 5/8 in. The Contemplator, 1949, oil and casein on linen with painted frame, 16 x 20 in. Women & Their Work

COVER: Saint John in the Wilderness, 1953, Oil on canvas, 35 x 25 in.

Owl with the Secret of the Enneagram, 1968, Acrylic on linen with gold and metal leaf, 16 x 12 in.

Cosmic Landscape with Meditator Centering, 1977, Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in.

Apollo and Courtesan at Home with Guardian Angel, 2009 (unfinished), oil on canvas, 9 x 12 in.

On March 8 at 2 pm in the auditorium at the Mexican American Cultural Center our Tribute to Kelly Fearing will include a screening of the documentary film, “An Artist’s Recollection: Kelly Fearing Recalls the Fort Worth Circle” (2008, directed by Scott Myers and Katie Robinson Edwards), a short Powerpoint presentation of Fearing’s artwork, and the premiere of a digital re-creation of the slide presenta-tion, “De Sonore Coloris,” a visual accompaniment to Three Polonaises by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. This is the first showing of this work since its original per-formance at the International Art and Music Workshop, University of Exeter, Eng-land, August 3 - 16, 1975. Collaged with cutout acetate in colors that evoke those of stained glass, the project represents one of Fearing’s most impressive works and stands as one of the last century’s most sumptuous synesthetic endeavors.

TEXAS BIENNIAL 5305 Bolm Road suite 12 Austin, TX 78721 512.385.1670 www.texasbiennial.com

This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.