Fertile Year
for a Fine Artist
Years of study at classical art academies during the 1980s gave Rebecca Alex '79 the technical tools to make it as a painter. But only after mastering her craft did she realize what Colby had given her: a palette of ideas, the primary colors and background tones for the flashes of inspiration that elevate paint on canvas to fine art.
As an English major at Colby in the late 1970s, Alex wanted to be a writer. She recalls studying literature and symbolism with Professors R. Mark Benbow and Charles Bassett, philosophy and religion with Professor Gustave Todrank, classics with Professor Peter Westervelt-even trying a beginning art design course that she didn't like.
After graduating with distinction in her major in May 1979 she headed for New York City and an internship at the Guggenheim Museum. Deciding she wanted to be a museum curator, she got a job in her home state of California at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art working on an inventory of the museum's holdings. She also took up painting. "What I found was that I was always coming home at night and working on my own art," she remembers.
Despite her best efforts to chart a stable career in the visual arts, working for museums and getting regular paychecks, an urge to create rather than to manage art got the upper hand. By the fall of 1980 she was back in New York beginning what would turn into six years of study at the Art Students League of New York and the National Academy School of Fine Arts. Now back in California, Alex combines painting and teaching art in a career that she says is far more successful and satisfying because of her early grounding at Colby in literature, mythology, philosophy and religion.
She has exhibited widely in California and New York as well as in Maine, Missouri and Switzerland. Recently she has mounted solo exhibitions at the Bade Museum at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and in the San Benito County Arts Commission Gallery in Hollister, and she had paintings in two group exhibitions in Santa Cruz last year. In 1993 she earned a master of fine arts degree at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, Calif., and has since taught courses there.
It wasn't until the M.F.A. program that Alex fully appreciated how her Colby education served her art. "In New York I studied almost pure technique-realism, visual and optical effects," she said. "I began to feel, though, that content was really missing from the artwork. I was looking for something more profound. That's where the liberal arts background kicked in. It helped me push the envelope of my work beyond the technical aspects of visual and optical representation."
She returned to literature, drawing inspiration from poetry and from essays by Emerson and Thoreau. Her own writing refined and clarified ideas that began to show up on her canvases.
She describes her more recent work as an attempt to bridge the material and spiritual worlds through art. Greater spiritual awareness and self-awareness are both the source and the result of her painting, she says. "After months of painting lilies (some as big as four by four-and-a-half feet) I began to experience on a deeply personal level the Passion, Resurrection and Redemption of Christ," she wrote in an artist's statement about her most recent solo exhibit, Nothing Gold Can Stay. Paintings in the exhibit also draw on non-Christian myths and spiritual traditions from alchemy to Greek and Sufist mythology.
Asked how she evaluates her success as an artist, Alex replied, "You do have to make a living." She estimates that a third of her income comes from sales of paintings to private collectors and the rest from teaching art to children. More important, she says, she feels successful in efforts to continue pushing the conceptual levels in her work and in making her art personal to the point that it becomes universal.
She is the founder and teacher of ArtWORKS!, an after-school program at elementary schools in the Bay area. "I love it almost as much as my own work," she said, because, with children, technique is almost always secondary to creativity. She remains active in the Monterey Bay chapter of The Women's Caucus for Art, an organization she co-founded to promote women and people of color in the arts. "The art world has been notorious for under-representing both groups," she said.
In 1994, Alex focused her work on themes of conception, creation and pregnancy, seeking the universal in the personal: she and her husband, Eric Feuss, were expecting their first child in mid-December. "It's been one of the most fertile periods in my life," she said.
The Sixties Class Notes/Table of Contents/The Seventies Class Notes