Therapy leads artist in new directions

When Terry Spehar-Fahey started therapy for depression in December 2004, she never dreamed it would lead her in new directions in her artwork as well as in her life.

At first, when her therapist asked the Moorpark artist if she ever painted from her feelings, she felt taken aback.

"He said, No, from your real feelings,'" Spehar-Fahey said. "I decided to do art therapy on myself by allowing myself to change the way I approach painting as an adjunct to therapy," she said. She began the first of more than 70 paintings she would paint over a five-month period.

"I discovered the key to real creativity," she said.

Before, she had painted things she enjoyed looking at: the high Sierra, people hiking and boating, the way the light fell on someone's face.

"For this work in therapy I wasn't thinking about the final product, only allowing the images to arise as I painted that day, depending on how I was feeling," she said. Some of the paintings were happy and bright, others dark and disturbing. "It was a journey into really intuitive art-making," she said.

When she showed the therapy paintings to friends and collectors, they often had emotional reactions, she said.

"They encouraged me to show them," she said. She won a prize in the first show in which she entered one.

"I thought, how do I integrate my old self with my new self?" she said. "It's a work in progress how to combine the two. But one thing I came away with was that I could paint anything I want, just painting by the intuitive, just making marks, developing a picture from there."

Entering the paintings in the Board and Friends Show of the Arts Council of the Conejo Valley in 2006 led to a new career for her at California Lutheran University.

Art professor Michael Pearce, a participant in that show and a new Arts Council board member, offered her a solo show at CLU.

While they planned that show, Pearce told her about a part-time teaching job available in the Art Department at CLU. She applied and was hired as an adjunct, teaching visual art in education in the summer of 2006. She teaches drawing and watercolor and recently accepted a job as budget analyst for academic affairs at CLU.

Spehar-Fahey is participating in the current Art Department Faculty Show at CLU through Feb. 16. The exhibit is in the Kwan Fong Gallery at CLU, 60 W. Olsen Road, Thousand Oaks. A reception is at 3 p.m. Jan. 26.

The faculty show isn't about the therapy work, she said.

"The work in the faculty show is portraits," she said. "Portraits tell you a lot about the artist, as much as they tell you about the sitter, the choices you make as an artist: the lighting, angle, color and composition. The common thing in all these paintings is drama, emotional, dramatic, beautiful paint," she said. "They are not done for a client, per se. I paint for myself. That is part of what I discovered in that therapy stuff: that just the process is enough."

Spehar-Fahey majored in art in college.

"But when I was a senior at UCLA I realized I didn't know who I was as an artist," she said. "I didn't have a portfolio or direction." After earning a bachelor's degree in painting, sculpture and graphic art, she taught ceramics at the high school she graduated from, then moved to England, where she worked for a while as a graphic artist. After returning to the United States, she took a job as a technical artist at Hughes Aircraft.

"I realized artists were low on the totem pole, so I took four years and got an MBA while working at Hughes," she said. She worked there another four years as a cost accountant, got married and after her first child was born, quit full-time work. But she kept busy doing bookkeeping for people, including the Arts Council, where she taught art classes. She also taught art classes in her children's schools and continued painting and exhibiting her work, winning awards along the way.

"I do most of my work in watercolor, but that is changing," she said. After spending time last summer with Pearce and art students at CLU, she was inspired to try oil painting.

"It's kind of a technical challenge going back to oil painting," she said. "It's energizing."

She paints to clarify her feelings, she said, to find insight and play with beautiful images and materials.

"I try to capture light that I see in front of me and light of personal clarity that can arise from intuitive image making," she said. "When intuition intersects with beauty, my creative spirit is charged."

Spehar-Fahey's Web site is: http://www.terryspehar-fahey.com.

--- Published in the Ventura County Star on Jan. 18, 2008