The Alaska House Art Gallery: Claire Fejes

Waiting

"Waiting"

Claire's Breakaway Decision:

The year was 1958: Fejes was in Fairbanks’ Co-op Drugstore and café, talking with Fairbanks anthropologist Charles Lucier about his travels on Alaska’s arctic coast:

"And he said, ‘I just got back from a place called Sesaulik. It’s not on the map. You wouldn’t like it, Claire. There’s no water, no electricity, and no white people.’ And I said, ‘Gee, that sounds like just the place I’d like to go.’ I wanted to see the way real life was lived. I wanted to experience it."

She flew from Fairbanks to Kotzebue with a tent and sleeping bag, a box of paints, and a box of groceries. By luck, she caught a ride with two Inupiat hunters, a woman and a boy, on their way to whaling camp. The ride was in a 20 foot homemade wooden boat with a Johnson motor – packed with boxes, barrels and cans.

Claire later wrote of that first moment, as she stepped from the boat and the sea, "I felt I had shed the other world and had been initiated into Eskimo life. Every defense, every preconception was stripped away, as though I had undergone a sort of baptism.... Here we were on the open sea. Not a tree. All you saw was the earth, the water, the sky, maybe the mountains, and the people working."

Their work absorbed her. Here was the ‘real life’ she’d heard about – where people put their full faith in each other, in their skills, and in nature’s bounty.

Cutting Fish

"Cutting Fish"

Mother and Child

"Mother and Child"

She worked alongside the women – helping the men butcher the whale and oogruk, bearded seal, as they were brought in. She ate and slept with her Inupiat hosts, looked after children, and kept watch for whales and seal. She sketched and wrote daily in her journals.

Later she said, "How did they feel about an artist? They’d never met one before. How did they know? So they left me alone. It was great. They’d sit and sew and do their skin-work on the floor, and I’d sit and draw. That was my work. And they respected my work and I respected theirs. It was great. It freed me, a lot."

Of the arctic coast, she said, "Nature moves from the sea and the land to the people and then back again to the sea. Painting the flow of life through a mother and child or through whaling captures the essence of the Eskimo culture."