Art
Nun teaches that
we are all born artists
By PATRICIA LEFEVERE
Frank Lloyd Wright once told
Franciscan Sr. Thomasita Fessler that he hoped she would not have to work
in an environment that is not conducive to the undertaking. She
never forgot his counsel.
Her six decades as a prolific artist have seen her turn musty
attics, dark basements and a vacated dormitory into galleries that gleam with
her art and that of her students. Though her atelier has moved back and forth
across Milwaukee three times in half a century, she has always called it Studio
San Damiano. Named after the church in Assisi where St. Francis first received
his call from God to rebuild my church, which has fallen into ruin,
the studio embodies Fesslers -- and Francis -- love of God, nature
and beauty.
On the second floor of the four-story studio, the visitor finds
scores of Fesslers works. An early portrait of a young woman, done when
the nun was a student, hangs not far from a large oil on canvas, titled after
composer Edvard Griegs Hall of the Mountain King. Close by is
a vivid oil and mixed media abstract of God Separating the Water and the
Land from her Days of Creation series.
Depictions of the Nativity abound -- in carvings, sculptures and
ceramics. Some of her religious works show the influence of Egyptian, Minoan
and Etruscan art. The nun credits art historian Kathleen Blackshear with
sparking these pieces. She told us to do anything we were inspired by or
in awe of. Fessler met Blackshear and other influential teachers when she
studied summers at the Chicago Art Institute, where she earned bachelors
and masters of fine arts degrees in 1946 and 1947.
In recent years the nun has designed nine stained-glass windows
for the chapel of St. Anns Intergenerational Center in Milwaukee. Last
year she created eight Christmas stamps, featuring the life of Mary, for the
Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. She is currently designing a
millennium coin for the Turkish government.
Fessler shows off a photograph of one of her favorite works -- a
sculpture of Christ meeting his mother at the cross. The figures, done in rough
stone, appear strong, primitive and abstract. Mother and son are united in a
single slab of stone. Marys head is hooded, hollow and faceless while her
son has a smooth, egg-shaped head that inclines toward his mother.
I tried to show the emotion of this big sorrow, the
nun said. In simplification, you can get so much feeling. Mary had always
stood and shared the cross. Here we see her empty, and hes full. Her
grief is in her hollowness.
Fessler drew much grief herself from her bold depiction. When a
photo feature of the work ran in Life magazine in 1953, it prompted
protests from students, parents -- even art patrons. One woman phoned her to
say that the work had given her husband bad thoughts. I thought to
myself, well, maybe you ought to get some help for your husband, the nun
said.
Among her best-known works are the nine-foot-high Christ she
carved out of Philippine mahogany for St. Cyprians Church in River Grove,
Ill.; her stained glass windows in St. Xavier Hospital in Dubuque, Iowa; and
her golden oil collage of the interior of St. Josaphat Basilica in Milwaukee,
owned by Marquette Universitys Haggerty Museum.
The basilica -- whose structure was the original Chicago Post
Office -- was brought by rail to Milwaukee early this century and redesigned by
Fesslers grandfather, Erhard Brielmaier, a self-taught architect and
carpenter.
Fessler also had two uncles who were architects and an artist aunt
who lived a Bohemian life in Rome and died in 1915 when the nun was three.
Fessler treasures her aunts palette.
While contemporary art -- especially Cubism -- has strongly
influenced her style, she refuses to label herself. Why cant I be
my own style? she said.
To describe her style, you have to describe the world,
said her assistant and former student, Brad VandeVenter.
I paint nothing I havent seen or visited, the
short, plump, habited nun told NCR, pointing to shelves containing some
250,000 slides she has taken during trips to 60 nations in Europe, Africa, Asia
and the Americas. Each slide is dated and labeled. Hundreds are featured in her
armchair lecture Around the World in Eight Days.
Many, when developed as photos, are a source for her paintings.
I wouldnt be where I am today without my travels, she
said.
She had no formal art lessons in her youth. When she entered the
Franciscans at 17, the order sent her to Milwaukee State Teachers College
(todays University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) to study art.
That led to a 55-year-career of teaching art to high school and
college students, adults and children. Fessler spent four decades of her
professional life building and heading the art department at Cardinal Stritch
College in Milwaukee. She was involuntarily pensioned from the college in
1991.
When God closed that door, he opened a window and allowed
her to continue teaching and creating, said VandeVenter. He and seven
other friends spent three months and filled two semis moving Fesslers
artworks and supplies from Stritch to the old St. Marys Academy
dormitory. By spring of 1992, Fessler again welcomed children and adults to her
studio.
VandeVenter, a prominent Milwaukee artist, met the nun when he
enrolled in her classes at Stritch in 1983. He said that she is first and
foremost a religious, then an educator and finally an artist. All three
features come fully alive in the studio.
We are all born artists, the nun said. We speak
with our five senses. Over the years she noticed that when college
students arrived to study art, they knew little or nothing about the language
of art, about how art expresses whats in the heart. She decided to start
at the very beginning -- with pre-schoolers and their mothers -- as well as
with college students.
Im going to teach you to eat with your eyes, she
promises the children in her classes (aged 4 to 14). She tells children that
God made each of them very special. He made us like a camera. You gotta
open your eyes to eat with your eyes. She instructed them to spend the
week snapping whatever they saw that they liked.
Children draw what they know, not what they know about, she said.
Art is really a childs language. What I do is try to develop their
creative powers.
Seeing with an artists eyes means learning how to use
colors. She asks children which color makes them happy, sad or angry and she
lets them explore on paper what makes them cry, laugh or shout.
Color is Gods gift to the artist. When we see a
rainbow we dont ask, What is this? Color is like adverbs and
adjectives. We dont use the same ones all the time. The three
primary colors are to art what the eight notes are to music, she said.
Its in their infinite combining, shaping and texture that art
happens.
Fessler believes passionately that children who create will
not destroy. Her children seem never to forget her. One of them, now a
prominent lawyer, nominated her for the outstanding alumnus award at University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee a few years ago, an honor accorded only to Golda Meir
and some 30 others of the universitys 95,000 alumni.
Some of her adult students have been with her 35 years, driving
weekly from Green Bay and Chicago to glean her inspiration, watch her
demonstrate and listen to her critiques.
Early next year Fessler will celebrate her 88th birthday. Though
her pace has slowed, and she no longer sculpts the massive works she created in
the 1950s and 1960s, she and VandeVenter are trying to locate as many of the
nuns 600 paintings and sculptures as they can find. They plan to exhibit
her works in a retrospective and later create a Sr. Thomasita Museum.
VandeVenter hopes that some of the works will be willed or donated
and that others can be bought back. He wants to have some of the paintings
copied and made available as prints. He believes that many of her works are
valuable teaching tools.
Fessler and VandeVenter not only share the same birthday, they
also share a vision for the future of the arts in Milwaukee. Together they want
to recreate a structure like the original San Damiano to be built along the
frontage of Lake Michigan. They intend to call it the St. Francis Center for
the Arts, after the area of Milwaukee known as St. Francis. The center would be
home to music, dance and the visual arts. VandeVenter plans to approach city
and archdiocesan authorities with his plans soon. He has also started a Web
site at [www.studiosandamiano.com]
Patricia Lefevere is an NCR special report
writer.
National Catholic Reporter, October 22, 1999
[corrected 11/05/1999]
|