#OccupySugarLoaf?
From staff reports
In recent years the Glen Arbor Sun has been honored to publish the gorgeous, whimsical, and sometimes humorous paintings of Hank Feeley, an artist who splits his time between Glen Arbor and Chicago. His local scenes, which you’ve seen depicted this paper, also appeared in the book Painting the Magic of Sleeping Bear Country, which the Leelanau Press published in 2012.
“Living in ‘the Most Beautiful Place in America’, it’s hard to resist the beauty and small town quirky-ness of the area,” says Feeley. “So, I basically make them for fun and to take a break from my bigger, more intense work.”
Feeley’s latest submission includes #OccupySugarLoaf, a humorous poke at the once popular ski resort which has been closed for 15 years while apparently languishing under the care of a series of disingenuous conmen and charlatans.
“We skied for years at Sugar Loaf when they were open, and I was always blown away by the view,” said Feeley. “So, last fall, I decided to trespass and climb to the top and paint the view. While I was painting, I began thinking of the unconscionable situation that has befallen this beautiful treasure. I added the plane and banner to take the painting from just a nice landscape to an ‘idea’.”
The phrase #occupysugarloaf appears similar to #occupywallstreet, the populist movement that manifested into a mass occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in the fall of 2011. #Occupywallstreet was initiated by a call for action seven months earlier by Adbusters publisher Kalle Lasn.
We asked Feeley whether his #occupysugarloaf was also a call for action.
“I didn’t do it with the thought of creating an activist uprising like Kalle Lasn. I was just expressing the exasperation and hope that I, and others, I am sure, feel.”
“If this humble painting winds up being used as part of a real, popular #occupysugarloaf movement for solving the Sugar Loaf conundrum, then so be it.”
We also asked Feeley about his muse as an artist.
“As someone once said, ‘Inspiration is the windfall of hard work and focus. Muses are too unreliable to keep on the payroll’,” he offered.
“As an artist turned businessman, and now a practicing artist again, I employ the businessman’s discipline in creating art. That is to say, I show up. I put in a five- or six-day workweek in the studio. I can’t wait for inspiration. I put in a solid workday, and if what comes out at the end looks inspired then that’s for you to judge.”
“What motivates me, however, is the lure of the mysterious, the adventurous, the discovery, the surprise that I find in making art. It’s a form of open-ended curiosity, I guess. As Einstien said: ‘Mystery is the sours of all great art and science’.”
“All visual artists have a well developed ability to see; and I collect what I see. I have boxes and boxes of images. All jumbled up. They are photographs I have taken, sketches I have made, fragments of old paintings, doodles, clips from newspapers and magazines, pieces of fabric, found objects. Whatever catches my eye. I go through these images whenever I start a fresh painting; but, when I see them again, reshuffled and out of context, I get new ideas about them. That’s my inspiration. I take images that weren’t meant to go together and put them together into a provocative and colorful composition.”
Art writer Ellen Fischer recently wrote about Feeley’s work: “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.”
Does Feeley consider his art abstract, since his paintings often employ humor.
“I teach a class called ‘Do a painting, then do something to the painting’. The thought here is to, for instance, take a traditional landscape painting and add an ‘idea’ to it so that it becomes more interesting and provocative. That’s what many of my Leelanau paintings try for. Sometimes they are done with humor and satire, because I do want to provoke a smile or a laugh. This is a friendly, fun place and I’d like to add to that.”
“Is my art abstract or realistic? Well, I guess because I’m mainly a collagist, I’d have to say that I abstract images of reality and juxtapose them against non-representational elements.”
