Portrait artist has animated touch

SAN ANTONIO -- Joey Fauerso paints portraits of her friends and family. That might be considered old-fashioned, but since she moved to San Antonio four years ago, Fauerso, 30, has been steadily building a reputation as one of the most outstanding contemporary artists in Texas.

Portrait artists generally aren't considered cutting-edge, but Fauerso has developed a distinctly modernistic, whimsical style.

She comes up with funny, offbeat poses for portraits, such as having her models suck on their fingers, or placing images of her brother into "found" landscapes -- old discarded theatrical backdrops.

"Wide Open Wide," an exhibit on view at Women & Their Work in Austin, Texas, adds a new element to Fauerso's work -- animation.

She learned how to make her portraits move during a yearlong residency in Roswell, N.M.

"Animation is generally thought of as mainly for kids, and I loved 'Fantasia' as a kid, but I wanted to learn how to do animation so I could expand what my portraits could do," she said.

"For me, it's a way of exploring the relationship between time and space."

Fauerso moved to San Antonio in 2002 and opened the Bower Gallery with two fellow University of Wisconsin-Madison alumni.

Her work subsequently was featured in "Come Forward: New Emerging Art in

Texas" in 2003 at the Dallas Museum of Art, "New Texas Painting" in 2005 at

DiverseWorks in Houston and this year in "New American Talent" at Art House in Austin.

While the critical acclaim has been nice, she's paid the bills -- like many artists -- with part-time jobs, such as teaching at San Antonio College and conducting workshops for Visual Thinking Strategies.

The Bower closed a couple of years ago, and Fauerso decided she needed to devote more time to her own work. In 2004, she applied for the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program in New Mexico.

"The Roswell residency appealed to me because it was one of the few that lasted a whole year," Fauerso said. "I was enjoying the work I was doing in San Antonio, but the challenge for an artist is to find the time to experiment and make mistakes."

Businessman Donald B. Anderson founded the program in 1967 as a way of bringing artists to the remote town in southeastern New Mexico. About five artists per year are invited to spend residences for six to 12 months, often culminating with a show at the Roswell Museum and Art Center.

Fauerso's 12-month residency began in the fall of 2005.

"I used the time to learn animation software," she said. "I took my own computer and had plenty of time to work it out."

Fauerso spent many hours watching and photographing the birds at Bitter Lake

Wildlife Refuge.

"I loved watching the birds flying around as if they were one body," she said. "In my latest work, I deal a lot with the idea of a body outside of a body."

The Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, also in Roswell, maintains a collection of work by artists who have participated in the Roswell residency.

"Joey was wonderful, the perfect kind of resident artist for us," said Nancy Fleming of the Anderson Museum. "It's always good when an artist finds something about Roswell and the New Mexico landscape to respond to in their work. And that's just what Joey did with the birds at Bitter."

That show, "If I'm Thinking I'm Probably Feeling," featured a wall covered with 227 portraits of her brother, Neil, who has been a frequent subject of her work. She scanned all of the portraits into a computer and used her newfound animation skills to create a 35-second video that was shown opposite the wall of portraits.

"Joey Fauerso's pixilated gallery marks a sea change in contemporary artists' use of powerful imaging technology," MaLin Wilson-Powell, former McNay Art Museum curator, wrote in her catalog essay for the exhibit.

The Bitter Lake birds also appear in "Wide Open Wide" at the Austin gallery.

The exhibit includes more than 300 portraits of a family friend, Tommy

McCutchon, which she worked on during her year in Roswell, along with paintings of the New Mexico night sky and the migratory birds Fauerso observed at the wildlife refuge. She used the paintings to create a short, animated video titled "Wide Open Wide."

Fauerso began by taking photographs and making a video of McCutchon sitting down and screaming. In painting the portraits, she concentrated on the shifting light and shadows on his face.

The 334 oil and acrylic paintings on paper were then scanned into a computer, along with wallpaper representing a wooded landscape and two series of watercolor paintings of the night sky and birds. Fauerso combined the digitized images to create the animation.

The portraits are arranged on two walls in giant grids opposite the projected video, creating a dialogue between the artist's individual paintings and the animation.

"It takes about 10 frames a second to make a video, so it is a labor-intensive project to do by hand," Fauerso said. "I wanted to be looser in my painting style, but I didn't want the paintings to be a shadow of the video."

"Wide Open Wide" begins with Fauerso's paintings, shaped like a human mouth, of the night sky around Roswell. That segues into a flock of flying black birds during the day and night. Then McCutchon makes his appearance seated in front of the faded gray landscape. He screams, and his mouth opens to reveal a sea of stars that gradually extends beyond his head and overtakes the entire pictorial space.

"My primary interest in figuration is in using the figure to provoke an awareness of space and the body in the viewer," Fauerso said. "My recent paintings of the night sky shaped like the silhouette of an open mouth are examples of this duality. The viewer looks at something that is flat and infinitely deep at the same time, something that is huge and impersonal while also being an extremely intimate part of the body."

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(E-mail: dgoddard@express-news.net)

c.2006 San Antonio Express-News