Fecho’s “Flutterings: Exploration of Nature” On View

From Susan Fecho's exhibition "Flutterings"WILSON, N.C. –  “Painting and drawing outdoors opens up the possibility of expressing an immediate present of nature in art.  My work focuses on creating interesting compositions by following the landscape’s lyrical and ever-changing qualities of light and shadows.”  Susan Fecho describes her latest exhibition of work, “Flutterings: Exploration of Nature,” currently on view in the Barton Art Galleries.

An opening reception for the exhibition will be held Sunday, Aug. 29 from 2 – 4 p.m. with an artist talk scheduled from 3 – 4 p.m.  The exhibition will run until September 23.

Fecho, a prominent and award-winning Eastern North Carolina artist, views travel as an invaluable opportunity to expand her education and to bring inspiration to her work. Her wide-ranging art can be categorized in a number of distinct ways – by location for each series, by media, and thematically. Fecho travels to feed her artmaking, to find sources in nature and built environments, to carve out private time to work unhampered by everyday duties, and to keep a fresh artist’s outlook.

Her artwork has germinated in her travels throughout three geographies: the Appalachians, the Tidewater region of North Carolina, and Newfoundland. Fecho uses her artist’s sketchbook to record sketched images, and also to put down extensive written notes recording her impressions and ideas for transforming these impressions into the final artwork-a unique and complex layered visual expression.

Fecho’s intention includes a reconstruction of each region’s history, making this connection through stories that include the human-built environment – architecture in all its manifestations – within the natural landscape of woodland, farmland, and the community commons.

From Susan Fecho's exhibition "Flutterings"Her 2010 Newfoundland series was completed during an intensive three-week residency at English Harbour Arts Centre on the Bonavista Peninsula, a windswept coastal artist’s haven isolated from most outside influences. The English Harbour Arts Centre provided the gift of direct nature-perception: immersion in the rocky terrain, a melding of land, sea, and mist. During this focused “art time,” her remarkable and sensitive artistic production in monoprints, drawing, painting, and fabric combine to indicate the level of her intensity as a producing creative pioneer. The Newfoundland residency had aspects of the aleatory; each day was a chance experience of circumstance and opportunity. The individual artworks directly reflect the circumstances of the day and location.

Fecho’s facility and experience in a variety of artmaking methods is a touchstone of her creative production, which shows evidence of skill in drawing, painting, lithography, relief printing, collage and assemblage, bookmaking, and computer-based graphic design. Her use of materials includes ink, watercolor, fabric, plus a diversity of found objects.

This lifelong devotion to art includes over 25 years of teaching and working with art students in the United States and abroad.  She has shown her work in 24 solo exhibitions as well as numerous regional, national and international invitationals.  Fecho also has published illustrations, designs, and photographs, including seven illustrative artist books such as “Portrait of the Outer Banks: an Artist’s Sketch” in 1996 and “Trunkfull: an Illuminated Year” in 2003.  “Trunkfull: an Illuminated Year” was accepted into several major collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, the Word and Image Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Women Artists in Washington, D.C., and the Zimmerli Art Museum, NAWA Collection, at Rutgers University in New Jersey.  Her works are also included in the collections of Phillip Morris in Winston-Salem, the Chancellor’s Collection at East Carolina University, the Twin County Museum and Hall of Fame in Rocky Mount, and the Blount-Bridgers Museum in Tarboro, among others.

Currently serving as professor and chair of the Barton College Department of Art, Fecho joined the Barton College community in the fall of 1997 as an associate professor of art. She earned both a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in printmaking, painting, and technology and a Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking and surface design from East Carolina University. She also studied at Goldsmith College: University of London, Northern Illinois University, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and the University of Maine.  Prior to joining the art faculty at Barton College, she served as associate professor and chair of the Art Department at Chowan College in Murfreesboro.

Fecho and her husband, Scott, make their home in historic Tarboro.

Gallery hours for the Barton Art Galleries are Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. For additional information, please contact Bonnie LoSchiavo in the Barton Art Galleries at 252-399-6477 or email: blloschiavo@barton.edu.

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Questions?  Please contact Kathy Daughety, director of public relations, at 252-399-6529 or email: kdaughety@barton.edu.