BIO

A native of Wynnewood, Pennsylvania Claudia R. Fieo has, since 1992, served as a professor of printmaking and graphic design at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in graphic design. For her graduate studies, Claudia moved to Florence, Italy, where she studied at Rosary College Graduate School of Art at Villa Schifanoia and Il Bisonte International School of Advanced Printmaking, earning Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees. Upon returning to America, Claudia was employed in the Philadelphia area as a graphic designer for, among others, the Please Touch Museum for Children; she also served during this time as an art instructor for the Main Line Center for the Arts, as well as for the Hussian School of Art. More recently, before moving to Massachusetts, Claudia taught graphic design and printmaking as an Assistant Professor of Art with Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota. Her prints are in many private collections and she has exhibited in Pennsylvania, New England and Italy. The artist currently resides in Mansfield, Massachusetts with her husband, two children and two dogs.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The progression of my art has reflected the arc of my life. Along the way, my impulse has been singular – to give expression to the mystery of life’s contrasting forces -- the joy of new life, new beginnings and the wonder of growth; the complexities of dying and mystery of death; the lifelong process of grief. Through visual language, I have sought to understand, and ultimately to accept, both the beauty and cruelty inhering in the cycles of nature.

The persistent touchstones in my work have always been nature and natural forms, no matter how representational or abstract the final work becomes. I am drawn to these subjects first on the level of a purely sensuous aesthetic, but also and of equal importance, on a level of meaning. Nature is for me the palpable manifestation of the divine; I am fascinated with its seamless harmonies and troubled by what I see as the nascent rupture of humanity from it. Dialectically, I aspire to the potential for reconciliation of people with the earth from which they've sprung, a potential intuited in my artwork.

The creative process begins for me with an epiphany, a spark or flicker, in the fog of my artistic search for meaning. The act of making marks, whether pencil to paper, crayon to lithographic stone or carving tool to wood or clay, becomes the passionate response to the very moments when ordinary perception links to the extraordinary - it is an act of reverence. Translated into visual metaphors for life experiences, illuminated for a time, such seemingly insignificant perceptions can deepen into moments of radiance, of clarity -- jewels for the memory -- offering a glimpse of the essence of a thing.

Claudia R. Fieo