Clown

Abstract

This is a mixed media piece of a clown with gray hands and feet. The clown's face is three dimensional coming out of a separate blue frame. There is a tube that runs down its body and the gray hands and feet are painted on white areas of the canvas. On top of the clown's face and frame reads "MCMLXXI". The clown's face has green eyeliner and green lips. It is wearing a blue hat. The frame surrounding the piece is white on the inside and black on the outside. Theres a few marks on the canvas. On the clown's face on the left side there is a smear of paint and graphite marks on the clown's teeth. Artist biography: Edward Spencer "Ted" Faiers was a major contributor to the arts in Memphis from the 1950s until his death in 1985. He moved to Memphis in 1952 and began teaching at the Memphis Academy of Art (now the Memphis College of Art). As an artist, he is best known for his collaborative 51- panel mural for the First Tennessee Bank headquarters that was completed by Betty Gilow. Faiers was born in Newquay, England in 1908 and raised in Canada. In 1941 he began is formal training in painting at the University of Alberta, where he remained until 1946. He spent one year under a scholarship at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Banff. From 1947-1948, Faiers taught at the University of Alberta. During his time in Canada, Faiers focused on stylized landscape and genre paintings that took on regional themes. Faires left Canada to study at the Art Students League in New York. He worked with Will Barnet, an artist who exposed him to the American Modernism movement of Indian Space Painting. Combining Native American patterns and motifs with the Cubist style of Picasso, this movement challenged artists to create a new genre and style of American painting. Faires left New York for Memphis to teach at the Academy of Art. He began fully developing his style in the 1960s and 1970s, and remained at the Memphis Academy of Art for 25 years, teaching drawing, painting, and printmaking. Faiers taught until his retirement in 1977, becoming professor emeritus upon this event. After he retired, Faiers received a commission from First Tennessee Bank to create a 51-panel 1,600-square-foot mural depicting the social and cultural history of Tennessee. Upon Faiers' death in 1985, Betty Gilow, his former student, executed the remaining panels.