Businessmen gather around a conference table, the Chicago skyline in the background, but the scene looks a bit grotesque. The mottled colors of Hank Feeley’s paintings are at once sensuous and garish, seductive and almost ugly, and the businessmen seem ready to climb the walls.
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Feeley was born in 1940 in Boston, and his family moved here in 1952. He planned to become a lawyer and join his father’s firm. After college he joined the navy. By the time he got out in 1965 his father had died. “I wasn’t sure what to do, so I came home. I got engaged, and we blew my severance pay in about a week, so I had to get a job.” Thinking he could make some use of his talent for drawing, he looked for work in advertising, but he had no training as a commercial artist. When Leo Burnett offered him a job in the research department, “I sort of bit my tongue and said yes. In fact I didn’t know much about it.”
After he retired, Feeley enrolled at the School of the Art Institute as a student at large, thinking of continuing his landscape painting. “But they’ve got a different idea about art. They changed my idea from just painting pretty pictures to using art as an expression of ideas and emotions, as an expression of your self. I did learn techniques, but I also learned about art in this different way, and that was a big change for me. I decided to make myself a blank sheet of paper and start all over, to learn from the bottom up.”
Now the Technocrat Charlatans Have a Raft of Problems is based on Gericault’s famous The Raft of the Medusa, which shows the survivors of a shipwreck. “It’s sort of the same thing,” says Feeley. “It’s a bad meeting, so to speak. We don’t know what happened, but this is the aftermath.” In Feeley’s canvas, a chaotic group huddles on a table, some of the figures reaching toward an airplane outside the meeting room’s picture window.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Tom Van Eynde.
