Kelly Fearing Dies at 92 ~ Noted Artist & Art Teacher at The University of Texas

Written by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin Monday, 06 February 2012 21:32

Austin, Texas (Statesman).- Kelly Fearing, painter, longtime University of Texas faculty member and one of the core members of a group that became known as the 'Fort Worth Circle' and who were instrumental in introducing modernist ideas to Texas art, died on Sunday March 13th in Austin, Texas of congestive heart failure. Fearing was 92. Over his prolific career, Fearing has been referred to as a magical realist, a Romantic surrealist, a mystical naturalist and a spiritual sensualist. He was on the UT faculty for more than four decades. In the mid-1940s, Fearing and his colleagues were some of the first artists in Texas to respond to the bold notions of Picasso, Miro and Modigliani. “We were considered way out at the time,” Fearing said in an interview several years ago. “But we were just doing what we liked.”

Born in Arkansas in 1918, Fearing studied art at Louisiana Tech University and Columbia University before heading to Fort Worth where he taught at Texas Wesleyan from 1945-47. In the early 1950s, Fearing landed in Austin and at UT’s then-nascent art program. Under his guidance, generations of young artists were encouraged to think and create independently, to imagine worlds far beyond Texas. He co-authored four major textbooks in art education while mentoring and inspiring hundreds of art teachers during his 40 year tenure at the university. Fearing also expanded art opportunities for school children, developing one of the country’s first university-based studio art programs for high school and junior high school students. Fearing received innumerable awards and has been the subject of many museum exhibitions. He was selected as the Texas Tribute Artist for the 2009 Texas Biennial; in 2008 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for the Study of Early Texas Art; in 2007 he received the prestigious E. William Doty Award from the university’s College of Fine Arts; and he was inducted into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame in 2003. Fearing's works can be found in the Dallas Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, San Antonio Art League Museum, and the Blanton Museum of Art has more than 80 of Fearing's prints and drawings in its permanent collection. His work is actively collected by those with particular interests in Texas modernism.




Fascinated with the natural world, Fearing returned to it again and again as his subject matter, blending realistically rendered trees, rocks and animals with idealized figures of poets and saints to create his magical scenes. Exploring spirituality remained at the fore of Fearing's paintings and life. He traveled to India to study with the mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. And the Christian mystic St. Francis of Assisi appears as a frequent character in Fearing's paintings.

In the past decade, he enjoyed rediscovery by a younger generation. After his retirement, Kelly Fearing's work regularly featured in exhibitions at the University of Texas. In 2002, the university organized “The Mystical World of Kelly Fearing: A Sixty-year Retrospective,” co-hosted by the Creative Research Laboratory and Flatbed Press. In 2005, his work was included in the seminal exhibition “Texas Modern: The Rediscovery of Early Texas Modernism (1935-1965)” at the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University. This exhibition will reinstalled at the Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi through January 3, 2010. In 2007, his work was included in the landmark exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum, “Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists in the 1940s.” Fearing’s work has inspired not only countless artists but also writers; in 2009, North Carolina poet Andrea Selch published a book of thirteen poems about his work: “Boy Returning Water to the Sea: Poems for Kelly Fearing.”

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