Day in the life by Miraldi Design

A Day in the Life of an Artist

KATH KA YTH F I E R AMO S C A By Wende Caporale

n a recent spring afternoon, I met with the artist Kathy Fieramosca in New York City where her work was among those featured in an exhibition of children’s portraits at the venerable Portraits, Inc. Fieramosca’s works can be found in public collections, most notably Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and Southern Methodist University in Dallas, as well as in private collections nationwide. For more than 20 years, she has garnered numerous awards from

national exhibitions devoted to representational painting and drawing. Fieramosca’s formal education was at the Columbus College of Art and Design in her native Ohio. She earned a BFA in illustration and immediately following graduation, was employed by the Ohio State University graphic design department. In typical fashion at the time, she was hired to do paste up and mechanicals. Her dream was to move to New York City, which she did in 1976, where she obtained a position at an advertising agency

creating storyboards for the first two years. The excitement of living in New York was heightened when Fieramosca had the opportunity to study with Push Pin Studios founder Milton Glaser and illustrator James McMullan at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). As she began gaining assignments to freelance work, she became an independent contractor doing spot illustration, book covers and general illustration for clients such as J. Walter Thompson Worldwide, Young & Rubicam, Viking Press and magazines such as Woman’s World, Good Housekeeping, and Reader’s Digest. By the late 1980s, however, the bottom dropped out of the illustration market and the work being commissioned was primarily computer-generated art. This meant a completely different approach to making art that required additional skills and new, expensive equipment. Fieramosca could not envision herself remaining in the commercial art world and chose instead to pursue the direction of fine art. Having established this choice, she realized that she would need more classical training in order to achieve her goal of working in a representational style. After some research, Fieramosca found an opportunity to enter the class of Jacob Collins at the National Academy of Design (now National Academy Museum) under a work study arrangement. On and off for the next decade, she studied drawing and painting in watercolour and oil with notable instructors, among them Anthony Antonios and Frederick Brosen. Her first work assignment was in the rights and reproduction department where she bestowed the right

Portrait of Cooper, pastel on paper, 20 x 16" (51 x 41 cm)

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Carnations, silverpoint, 8 x 6" (20 x 15 cm)

Daisy and Carnations, silverpoint, 8 x 6" (20 x 15 cm)

Still Life with Turnip, oil on linen, 15 x 13" (38 x 33 cm)

to reproduce works from the collection, selectively loaning transparencies and billing for their usage. With her position secured, Fieramosca was later assigned to work with the curator of drawings and prints at the Academy, Isabelle Dervaux (now Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at The Morgan Library & Museum), a position that she coveted. She was designated the task of inventorying the entire collection of works on paper by artists including Kenyon Cox, William McGregor Paxton, Thomas Dewing, sculptors Anna Hyatt Huntington and Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, Maxfield Parrish, Dennis Miller Bunker, and John La Farge. Fieramosca viewed this experience as an extensive course in American art history since

the works she was cataloging encompassed 19th- and 20th-century American art. Fieramosca found the 10 years she spent studying and working at the National Academy to be an enriching experience. Nonetheless, there were other artists with whom she wanted to study outside of that institution. She spent several summers as a monitor for Daniel Greene in Westchester, New York. One of her classmates at the National Academy suggested Fieramosca might respond to the work and instruction of Michael Aviano. Fieramosca describes how her classmate’s work did not appear distinguished at the Academy until she was invited to an exhibition the artist had at a New York gallery. It was then that Fieramosca was so impressed

with the young artist’s level of accomplishment that she followed her suggestion and signed on with Aviano. She studied with him once a week in a six-hour session for three years. Aviano’s emphasis was on art theory with an emphasis on anatomy and the Munsell color system, which encouraged modeling form in nine values. When Aviano stopped teaching for health reasons, her training continued under the direction of Jon deMartin, another former student of Aviano’s, who took a more pragmatic approach to painting. Staten Island, New York, is where Fieramosca maintains her studio and home with her husband, Eddie, a former psychiatric social worker now a local pastor with a focus on counselling. He has provided

A Day in the Life of an Artist

the artist with astute critiques and valuable emotional support for which she is very grateful. The couple moved to Staten Island in 1984 and lived in a townhouse before they decided in 2006 to purchase an old colonial home. When searching for a home that would also encompass a studio, the artist confided that she took the advice of her former teacher who suggested that an artist bring a compass when choosing a workspace to determine the viability of north light. Fieramosca was delighted to discover that the back of the house had several bedrooms that precisely faced north. One of the first things the couple did when they purchased

the house was to renovate one bedroom to include an 8-foot window with a translucent shade which would become her studio. In 2012, Fieramosca was commissioned by the CIA to create a narrative painting of Adolf Tolkachev, the Soviet electronics engineer who volunteered substantial material to the U.S. CIA from 1979 to 1985. At the unveiling at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Fieramosca was introduced to David E. Hoffman, a contributing editor to The Washington Post, who was finishing a book about Tolkachev titled The Billion Dollar Spy. Their meeting resulted in Fieramosca’s painting Quiet Courage: Tolkachev being reproduced in Hoffman’s forthcoming book. Fieramosca’s works have been exhibited extensively in national exhibitions including Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, the National Academy, The Salmagundi Club, American Artists Professional League, the Society of Illustrators Museum of American Illustration in New York City, and the

Portrait of Dr. Edward Greenwald, oil on linen, 24 x 20" (61 x 51 cm)

Tolkachev: Quiet Courage, oil on linen, 33 x 38" (84 x 97 cm)

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Tea Time, oil on linen, 14 x 15" (36 x 38 cm)

Newington-Cropsey Foundation Gallery, Hastings-on-the-Hudson, New York. In 2006, Fieramosca was awarded the Premier Grant Award from the Council of the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island. The grant enabled her to assemble a solo show including 30 drawings in graphite, silverpoint and pastel pencil once she found the venue at Art Lab of Snug Harbor gallery space on Staten Island. Included in the exhibit were beautifully recreated replicas of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ drawings, which Fieramosca had copied at the Metropolitan Museum in their drawing study room along with 10 botanical silverpoint drawings. Fieramosca’s teaching career began when the director from Art Lab of Snug Harbor contacted her sometime after her exhibition and invited her to teach. For the last five years, Fieramosca has been teaching classes in foundations drawing, portraiture in watercolour and botanical subjects in silverpoint on Mondays in two half-day classes. With her ongoing passion, Fieramosca

also remains an avid student proficient in many media. An exquisite draftsman in graphite and silverpoint, she also works in watercolour, oil and pastel. Currently the artist’s schedule includes a biweekly six-hour class in still life painting with deMartin. Most weeks from Wednesday through Friday and occasionally on Saturday, Fieramosca spends five to six hours a day in the studio. Although Sundays have traditionally been the day that she spends with family, she finds a few hours in the morning before church to address her work. For years the artist attended weekly open sessions working from the model. These classes in lower Manhattan, which she refers to as “exercise” and hopes to resume in the near future, offer both short and long poses. Always expanding her repertoire, Fieramosca took courses at the International Center of Photography (ICP), which she credits with heightening her understanding of lighting and generally improving her photography skills in order to take her own reference photos. In 2010, Fieramosca took a master class offered by deMartin in landscape painting which included visits to Rome, Florence and five days in Umbria where they painted from the terrace at a hillside villa overlooking the valleys filled with fields of barley, sunflowers and olive groves. It was a memorable experience she hopes to recreate in the future. Always attempting to improve and expand her still life skills, her aim is to work with different objects and textures and challenging subject matter in the direction of French artists Fantin-Latour and Chardin. Naturally artists have many obligations not only to all aspects of their work but also to family and friends. Time management is an ongoing challenge with responsibilities such as teaching, client contact, photography, networking and various ongoing responsibilities at home. Fieramosca’s nonagenarian parents still live in Ohio and the artist visits every few months to prepare and freeze meals, do general housekeeping and help them maintain themselves. Having sustained an ongoing friendship as protégée to Aviano, she visits him regularly and enjoys the professional comradery that they share. Currently the artist is preparing for her

Self Portrait, pastel pencil on watercolor toned paper, 18 x 15" (46 x 38 cm) summer project, which is her submission to the Noble Maritime Collection exhibition on Staten Island, which this year will highlight the Robbins Reef Lighthouse. She has participated in art auctions to benefit the Maritime Museum and themed shows for the past five years. The Robbins Reef exhibition will feature the lighthouse, which was built in 1839 and is located in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was put up for sale under the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act and the Noble Maritime Collection was granted stewardship. The last caretaker was the son of Captain John Walker, the original keeper, but it was his formidable wife, Katherine “Kate,” who dutifully maintained the lighthouse for over 33 years after his death on the captain’s instructions to “mind

the light.” Her experience having accepted the arduous task while raising their children is legendary. The exhibition will be on view from September 2015 to 2018. Fieramosca’s work is represented by Portraits, Inc. New York City; Francesca Anderson Fine Art, Lexington, Massachusetts; and Sewell Fine Portraiture and Gallery 71, New York City.

Wende Caporale is a highly successful artist whose portraits are always in great demand. Her biography and list of awards and accomplishments runs to many pages. As you’ll read in this ongoing series, Wende’s proactive approach to work and life make her the ideal columnist for the subject every artist has to face on a daily basis. wendecaporale@aol.com www.wendecaporale.com

A Day in the Life of an Artist