Seasonal resident Hank Feeley’s painting studio has been hidden in plain sight in Vero for 18 years.
The roomy space takes up part of the second floor of an office building on Beachland Boulevard, but don’t look for Feeley’s name on the sign outside. Filled with paintings, collages, drawings and a clutter of magazines and art supplies, the studio is the artist’s private retreat and workspace.
The focus of the room is near its north-facing windows, where a large easel holds a work in progress. It is a semi-abstract painting, a study in bold contrasts of color and pattern that includes a couple of representational elements: a crouching female figure in vivid blue descends into the composition from its top edge, while a small, classical bust floats against an incandescent yellow background near the painting’s center.
It’s probably not the type of thing that people think of when it comes to home décor, and Feeley, who has gallery representation in his hometown of Chicago as well as New York City, is fine with that. Outside of the annual John’s Island “Very Own” art show, he doesn’t exhibit his work locally, although he admits that “there are a bunch of people around here” who own his art.
Feeley recalls a conversation that his wife Diane had a while back with a neighbor. Upon hearing that Diane’s husband was an artist, she wondered if he had anything that might go with her new sofa.
“No,” replied Diane Feeley. “My husband’s work would eat your sofa.”
Hank Feeley repeats the quote, deadpan. “That’s become an expression I use a lot,” he adds with a smile.
The intensity of his style, combining imagery from popular culture, art history and advertising with heady color, has something in common with surrealist Max Ernst’s description of his own work in collage: “A linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them.”
Though he ended up a top executive with an international advertising agency, Feely thought of himself as an artist “from birth,” he says. Born in Cambridge, MA, he moved to Chicago when his father, an FBI agent, was transferred there. It was 1952; Feeley was 12.
“I’d heard there was a lake over there,” he says. He’d had a mental picture of Chicago as a sort of frontier town, complete with cowboys and Indians. He was taken aback by what he found: a big city with skyscrapers and a lake that was totally unlike the lily-fringed ponds he knew back East.
For college he returned to Massachusetts, where he received a BA in philosophy at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. He followed that with a two-year hitch in the Navy.
Back in Chicago and engaged to be married, Feeley needed a job.
“That’s how I got into the advertising business – I thought I’d get a job as an artist. And didn’t,” he says.
He wound up with an entry-level job in the research department of Leo Burnett Company Inc., the international advertising firm. He stayed there for 28 years, rising to the position of international chairman/CEO. He retired as a vice-chairman of the global giant.
Even as his career progressed, in his spare time Feeley dabbled in watercolor landscapes, which he gave away to family and friends. Then, with his four children grown, his thoughts turned to the road not taken.
“I got to the point where I said, ‘I want to pursue art’,” he says.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), located right down the street from his office, seemed the natural place to start. He took a class “here and there,” then at 53 went for a BFA.
“I was so naïve,” he says. “I was in classes with these young kids doing this way-out stuff, and I’m trying to paint that box, or that dog. They must have thought, what the hell is this guy doing here?”
Feeley’s dedication ultimately won him the respect of his fellow students, and his age positioned him as a peer with his teachers. Many became his friends, among them, Barbara Rossi and Phil Hanson, distinguished members of a group of figurative artists – with a twist – known as the Chicago Imagists.
It also helped that Feeley had all of his academics behind him, not only the BA from Holy Cross, but also a Program for Management Development degree from Harvard Business School. All he needed was art history and studio classes, so he double-majored and “packed the credits in,” with day classes, night classes and summer school.
It was SAIC’s art history classes that led to Feeley’s understanding of contemporary art as being on a continuum of artistic experimentation and discovery. The work of a Duchamp or Picasso, which had previously seemed beyond comprehension to him, now made sense.
Art history, he says, was “the essential thing” that allowed him to expand his horizons beyond those of the mere art hobbyist. He began to think about how his art related to that which had come before.
He was also influenced by an artist whose work Feeley discovered on his own. Robert Barnes, professor emeritus at Indiana University, was having a show in Chicago, when Feeley introduced himself.
“We got to talking, and I loved his work. I wanted to ‘be’ him at one time. I called him up after his show and said, ‘Hey, I want to come down and study with you’.”
A younger artist, Feeley speculates, might not have had the nerve to suggest such a thing; indeed, Barnes might not have wanted to take on a student with less life experience. As it was, Barnes invited Feeley to spend a week with him in his Bloomington, IN, studio.
By discussing ideas with Barnes and watching the intuitive way in which Barnes began and developed his paintings (in one memorable instance, Feeley was invited to paint on one of his mentor’s canvases), Feeley says he learned to think in a less linear fashion about his own painting process.
After graduation, an SAIC teacher and friend, Dan Guston, got Feeley his first professional show at Lyons Wier Gallery, then located in Chicago. Feeley eventually moved on to the Aron Packer Gallery (now the Packer Schopf Gallery) in Chicago, where he continues to show.
“(Packer) is very outsider-oriented, shows very unusual stuff. I’m probably the least outsider person he’s got,” says Feeley.
Yet the art in the gallery is “very forward,” he says. “I’m very happy to be with him.”
In New York, Feeley is represented by First Street Gallery in Chelsea. His solo show there opens May 26 and continues through June 20.
He joined the First Street Gallery, an artists’ co-op, by invitation, the result of having answered a call for artists for a group show at the gallery. He answered many such calls before finding his niche in New York.
“Rejection: that’s another thing that young people don’t understand,” he says. “Being a fine artist, you have to accept rejection. You have to understand rejection. Well, I came from a business that had a lot of rejection. So I knew how to deal with it.”
