Kelly Fearing

Kelly Fearing, “The Lifters”, 1944, Etching, 24.3 x 20.9 cm, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Born in Arkansas in 1918, Kelly Fearing was a painter, print maker, and teacher. He studied art at Louisiana Tech University and New York’s Columbia University, where he earned his Master’s Degree in 1950. He relocated to Fort Worth, Texas, in 1943 and joined the Fort Worth Circle, a progressive art colony, mostly young artists, which was active during the 1940s and 1950s.

Though not defined by a specific aesthetic, the Fort Worth Circle was important for moving beyond the realism and agrarian subject matter of American Regionalism, which dominated Texas art in the 1930s and 1940s. Kelly Fearing and his Fort Worth cohorts were the first artists in the state to respond in a significant way to European artists such as Picasso, Braque, Klee, Kandinsky, Modigliani, Ernst, Klee, and Miro.

After teaching from 1945 to 1947 at Texas Wesleyan, Kelly Fearing assumed the Professorship of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for forty years. A noted art educator, he  co-authored several multi-volume art education textbooks from 1960 through the 1980s. As a pioneer in art education in America, Fearing founded The University of Texas Junior Art Project, the first visual arts outreach program of its kind in Texas. He became Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas in 1987 and, after  his retirement, continued to work as a professional artist. 

Kelly Fearing worked in almost all traditional mediums, with prominence in oil painting and collage work. The work from his Fort Worth years is abstract in form, surrealistic and filled with allegory., characteristics which would remain throughout the body of his work. Fearing’s art has been referred to as magical realist, mystical naturalist and Romantic surrealist.

Kelly Fearing died on March 13, 2011 from congestive heart failure at the age of ninety-two. More than 80 of his prints and drawings are in the Blanton Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

More works by Kelly Fearing can be found at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2015/07/16/six-etchings-by-kelly-fearing-kelly-fearing-was/