Professor's art drawn from life

By Amy Dumont '09

Don't be afraid to make a mistake. Get past the fear of failure. Replace it with faith. That's the way Professor of Art Claudia R. Fieo approaches art as well as life. "Even if I fail," she said, "I must continue to act. Action is part of healing."

Arc of Intent: Claudia R. Fieo, Selected Works, 1988–2008, which is currently in the Beard and Weil Galleries through Oct. 19, reflects her faith in creating art, as well as traces the arc of her life. As a printmaker, this marks Fieo's 11th solo exhibition. The works span a range of techniques, stylistic choices and creative periods, but ultimately center upon what Fieo calls the "mystery of life's contrasting forces."

"Through visual language, I have sought to understand, and ultimately to accept, both the beauty and cruelty inhering in the cycles of nature," she said.

Throughout her artistic career, persistent touchstones in her work have been nature and natural forms. Fieo explains that she usually begins the creative process with an epiphany that she feels driven to record. The act of drawing becomes a passionate response to the very moments when the ordinary perception links to the extraordinary. These rough drawings then become the starting point for many of her prints. Sometimes drawings serendipitously cycle back into work to resolve unfinished prints. Fieo's imagery often parallels her personal life. She attributes her yearning to create and heal to the deaths of two of her brothers at young ages.

"I have come to realize how central the experience of loving and losing my brothers has been to my life and to my art," she recently explained to a full house in Ellison Lecture Hall during the opening of her exhibition in September.

Fieo grew up as the middle of five children. Her older brother Greg, a year her senior, died at age 16, the summer before she entered high school. Eric, her younger brother by a year, died at age 21, when they were both in college. Both brothers had a congenital blood disease called thalassemia, more commonly known as Cooley's anemia.

Her earlier works are more melancholy, and reflect her desire to find solace and the ability to heal. Nature, cycles, and life stages are thematically abundant. In her piece, As I Lay Dreaming, she shows how the entire world can change in the course of a night. The print is of saplings, struggling to cope after a frigid ice storm swept over them.

Fieo's interest in creating began early in life. Her mother loves to talk about how at age 6, Fieo could be found struggling to use her sewing machine. The youngster was barely able to reach the pedals. However, becoming an artist was not always in the forefront of Fieo's plans.

After the loss of her older brother, she toyed with the idea of pursuing a career in the medical field as a way to help others, but her high school art teacher persuaded her to not abandon her artistic talents. So she attended Penn State University to take science classes, and she parlayed her interest in art and science into a potential career in medical illustration. Ultimately, she decided to pursue graphic design and transferred to Carnegie Mellon University.

The connection between printmaking and the sciences is clear; the process of printmaking involves different chemical techniques. Even in some of her earliest professional pursuits, the sciences crept back into the picture. For example, she worked for a design firm in Philadelphia where she helped create cover designs for science textbooks.

A walk through the Beard and Weil Galleries shows the full range of Fieo's experimentation with different mediums. In 2001, Fieo went on sabbatical, and in order to give her studies more structure, she took a figure drawing course and a ceramics course at Rhode Island School of Design.

She was awarded a grant from Wheaton to create a large ceramic installation to explore the six paradigms for growth in nature. Although four of the five ceramic tableaus "failed," she used the remains to create one of the most stunning and personalized works in the gallery—Gifts of the Mother, a generational spiral that seems to burst off the wall. It represents the continuation of life and incorporates her young children's handprints at ages 5 and 2, jewelry her mother made, and crocheted pieces created by her aunts and grandmother .

At her lecture this fall, the room was filled with not only her family and colleagues, but also with her students, eager to hear their professor speak so profoundly about her personal endeavors. Some of her printmaking students even assisted in the installation of the exhibit.

This fall, Fieo is teaching a First-Year Seminar titled "Cross Training: Building the Buff Brain Through Drawing and Design." She describes it as a foundational studio class that teaches critical thinking and problem solving through drawing and design composition.

Throughout the years, Fieo's students have inspired her, and she has learned so much from working with them. She hopes that they will draw encouragement from seeing her finished works and recognize that creative perseverance, despite self-doubt, is an important stepping stone to artistic achievement.

"There are some things we cannot change," she said. "But other things are in our control. Life can be cruel in the midst of a loss, but life also offers many gifts that help us carry on with dignity."

Her students are one of the greatest gifts, she noted. "They've inspired me and given me so much. I thank them."