The Alaska House Art Gallery: Claire Fejes

New York City, immigrant parents and the Depression forged her

Alaska set her free

She became an artist, and left her stamp
— vigorous and daring —
on her adopted home

Claire's Life Story: Claire Specht Fejes 1920 - 1998

Born in New York to immigrant parents from Austria and Poland, Fejes’ artistic life was forged by the Depression years. She received her art training through museum-based WPA arts projects in Manhattan, intending to work as a sculptor.

Married in 1942, she moved with husband Joe Fejes to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1946 – from New York’s Bronx to a log cabin in a sub-arctic frontier town. She abandoned sculpture as impractical, turning to oils.

For a decade, Fejes painted on a small kitchen table near the cabin’s wood stove: self-portraits, nudes, the neighbors, scenes from the valley and woods. Local Athabascan and Eskimo women sat for her, and Fejes grew fascinated with their stories and the subsistence life they described far from town.

One winter, she said, it was so cold, she painted in lined boots, long underwear, pants and two sweaters. In the spring, she realized all her paintings had stoves in them.

In 1958, she made a breakaway decision. Packing her painting supplies, a tent, and some food, she traveled to Sesaulik, an Inupiat whaling camp on Alaska’s arctic coast. The experience was transformational. On her return she produced twenty oils, dubbed the Sesaulik 20, in a rush of creativity, working with a palette knife on Masonite. The experience set her style – unplanned, swift, and emotionally intense – based on a deep immersion in her subject.

The Sesaulik 20 captured interest beyond Alaska. Seattle’s Frye Art Museum invited Fejes to mount a one-woman show, and its good review led to a solo exhibit at the Roko Gallery in New York.

Claire and Joe Fejes

From the kitchen table to the living room, then to a spacious studio overlooking the Chena River, Claire Fejes’ work space was a world away – no phone, no long lunches, few visitors – just hours on her feet, working up to three palettes at a time. She might finish a canvas in a day, or keep it where she could see it for years, waiting to see what else it needed. Bach, Vivaldi, and Beethoven in the background; painting always first.

She painted, and she wrote. Fejes wrote regularly in journals from childhood until her death, publishing four books about her travels, painting, and life in Alaska.

In her last decade, Claire Fejes spent winters in New York and San Diego, and her summers in Alaska. As she had for half a century, she wrote and painted in Fairbanks. Of Alaska, she said:

'This is my inspiration. I don’t feel like painting in New York or any other place. This is where I’m inspired by the people and the land. This is my inspiration here. It just comes pouring out of me when I’m here. When I’m any other place, I don’t even want to paint.'